1
00:00:00,450 --> 00:00:11,849
We are very lucky to have Julia speak to us because she's been parachuted into such a fast moving and very uncertain first year office and so forth,

2
00:00:11,850 --> 00:00:17,610
mostly on some of these other figures today for a variety of reasons.

3
00:00:18,730 --> 00:00:25,820
But co-researcher Julia, they've been working together on this particular subject, so seminal.

4
00:00:26,190 --> 00:00:31,770
And so these are the values that are going to get for nine year olds anyway.

5
00:00:32,220 --> 00:00:41,910
But Julian is a Wellcome Trust Dphil student researching instructions in the Ethiopian State Department of

6
00:00:41,910 --> 00:00:49,380
Reproductive Health Forces researchers to buy their lunch and make locomotion practices for girls in 43,080.

7
00:00:50,070 --> 00:00:58,860
She had an NSC, his African studies here at Oxford and served six years of professional experience working with UNICEF,

8
00:00:59,310 --> 00:01:09,090
UNFPA and versus the NGOs on the issue of contemporary women's rights and reproduction on set across South America and sub-Saharan African countries,

9
00:01:09,090 --> 00:01:12,570
telling us over lunch about the work of actuaries in Ethiopia.

10
00:01:12,920 --> 00:01:19,350
And so his direct fieldwork experience to get the teeth into, perhaps she would answer questions about some interesting interesting as well.

11
00:01:19,710 --> 00:01:23,880
I'm sure this is a very pretty difficult emotive subject.

12
00:01:24,350 --> 00:01:28,650
But, you know, thank you both very last minute to some of the stories.

13
00:01:29,610 --> 00:01:35,460
Thank you so much. No, pleasure's all mine. I really do apologise to those who are expecting David Anderson today, though.

14
00:01:35,700 --> 00:01:43,290
I know he's a very dynamic speaker and I'm sorry to be the last man standing, but I did co-author the paper with David.

15
00:01:43,290 --> 00:01:50,189
He was most present today and I was also one of the principal researchers on the larger legal case that you may or may not have read about,

16
00:01:50,190 --> 00:01:51,930
but that's what this research came out of.

17
00:01:53,040 --> 00:01:59,640
But just to give you a bit of background about the case, it was brought forward to the High Court in London by four elderly Kenyan claimants,

18
00:02:00,120 --> 00:02:06,510
all of whom had been unduly tortured under the hands of the British colonial government at the time of the Mau Mau uprising in the 1950s.

19
00:02:07,230 --> 00:02:11,940
So the case ended in July of last year when the High Court found that the British government

20
00:02:11,940 --> 00:02:17,370
was responsible for human rights abuses carried out by colonialists in Kenya 70 years ago,

21
00:02:17,790 --> 00:02:25,710
including torture and rapes. This is a really landmark case and stipulated for the first time compensation packages for victims in Kenya.

22
00:02:26,220 --> 00:02:29,100
So those have been agreed, but the particulars will still be ironed out.

23
00:02:30,480 --> 00:02:36,120
So I was one of the principal researchers on the claimant's case and I, along with several other colleagues,

24
00:02:36,600 --> 00:02:40,530
spent many months of tedious labour combing through the hundreds of thousands of pages

25
00:02:41,040 --> 00:02:45,030
of new evidence surrounding British activities in Kenya during the Melmotte period.

26
00:02:45,570 --> 00:02:50,250
And so though this evidence itself is also another large story,

27
00:02:50,970 --> 00:02:57,480
it's a specific room of documents that is called the hands of disclosure, and it's sort of a presentation in itself.

28
00:02:58,170 --> 00:03:03,540
Needless to say, David Anderson and other historians were quite instrumental on these documents being brought to light.

29
00:03:04,140 --> 00:03:09,990
They in their own research, they recognised a huge gap in official literature from this period and noticed existing

30
00:03:09,990 --> 00:03:13,230
Foreign Office records that allude to other documents have been not available.

31
00:03:13,860 --> 00:03:19,350
The files were then released under the pretence of being merely misplaced since the early 1960s.

32
00:03:20,040 --> 00:03:26,999
And so, having been through the length of them, I can tell you that they are quite grisly in their detail of rape, torture,

33
00:03:27,000 --> 00:03:35,549
cover ups and gross mismanagement in the Colonial Office at the time of the NAMA rebellion in Kenya and also other colonial sites, including Cyprus.

34
00:03:35,550 --> 00:03:44,070
And but this is just about Kenya. So with the hassle of disclosure and the court case, there's clearly a great deal of back story to this talk.

35
00:03:44,580 --> 00:03:52,260
And but today I'm going to narrow the focus specifically to the issue of sexual violence and prosecution of sex crimes,

36
00:03:52,260 --> 00:03:55,350
including rape and indecent assault at the time of the Mau Mau.

37
00:03:56,280 --> 00:04:00,509
My own academic and professional background, as you heard, involves issues of women's rights,

38
00:04:00,510 --> 00:04:03,960
health and violence in Africa, both contemporary and historical.

39
00:04:04,500 --> 00:04:11,550
So over the course of the legal case research, Dave engaged me specifically to work on issues of rape and sexual violence in the hands of documents.

40
00:04:12,420 --> 00:04:18,210
We singled out the issue of singled out the use of rape and its prosecutions, period, for several reasons.

41
00:04:18,990 --> 00:04:23,550
First, well, besides the fact that there's a lot of a large number of cases documented.

42
00:04:24,600 --> 00:04:32,250
But aside from that, there's a surprising gap in scholarship on the use of rape and sexual violence in late colonial and post-colonial conflicts,

43
00:04:32,670 --> 00:04:35,670
either in Africa or elsewhere. Also,

44
00:04:36,150 --> 00:04:40,740
the conversations about instances and prosecution of rape and sexual violence in wartime have

45
00:04:40,740 --> 00:04:46,500
been somewhat clouded by discourses arising from the Balkans and Rwandan conflicts of the 1990s.

46
00:04:47,580 --> 00:04:51,690
The Balkans was a particular watershed for the discussion of rape in wartime because it was the

47
00:04:51,690 --> 00:04:56,130
first conflict which rape was considered a separate and distinct war crimes to be prosecuted.

48
00:04:56,940 --> 00:05:03,840
That's related to the particular nature of rape in this conflict. News on all sides is a legitimate weapon of mass humiliation and punishment.

49
00:05:04,590 --> 00:05:05,760
In the Rwandan genocide,

50
00:05:05,760 --> 00:05:12,810
there was also a similar explosion of the use of rape by the Hutu militias and again discourses on the use of rape as a weapon of war.

51
00:05:13,110 --> 00:05:16,290
Similar to the Balkans, conversations were unearth and expanded.

52
00:05:17,850 --> 00:05:23,970
But what is problematic about these discourses is the way in which they have been applied retroactively to all wars and conflicts.

53
00:05:24,540 --> 00:05:30,510
The Balkans pattern of rape as a weapon of mass destruction is indeed not applicable to every conflict, including the memo.

54
00:05:31,080 --> 00:05:35,430
And it is important to nuance the discussion of sexual violence and war so as

55
00:05:35,430 --> 00:05:39,360
not to obscure the histories through generalised and anachronistic language.

56
00:05:39,690 --> 00:05:42,120
So again, this is one of the reasons why we undertook this work.

57
00:05:43,170 --> 00:05:48,990
So with this preamble in mind, let me launch into our own investigation of prosecution of rape in Myanmar,

58
00:05:49,620 --> 00:05:54,960
and perhaps we could discuss some of the larger arguments about conflict and rape in wartime more generally in the Q&A.

59
00:05:55,860 --> 00:06:00,360
So in the most recent court case, to go back to this narrative,

60
00:06:00,690 --> 00:06:05,340
one of the four elderly Kenyan claimants in court was a Kikuyu woman named Jane Morrow.

61
00:06:06,240 --> 00:06:09,660
Jane's personal testimony describe incidents of sexual abuse.

62
00:06:10,530 --> 00:06:17,550
Jane was only 15 years old, 15 years old in 1954 when she was accused of being a mama sympathiser.

63
00:06:18,330 --> 00:06:21,690
And along with other villages, she was taken into account for interrogation.

64
00:06:23,160 --> 00:06:27,899
She was then pinned to the floor by four African guards who held her thighs apart while another guard

65
00:06:27,900 --> 00:06:33,390
forced a glass bottle into her vagina using the sole of his boots to direct the bottle deeply into her.

66
00:06:33,840 --> 00:06:36,960
The pain was excruciating and Jane realised the bottle had been heated.

67
00:06:37,770 --> 00:06:44,400
When this ordeal came to an end, she was compelled to sit and watch as the other young women incarcerated were subjected to the same torture.

68
00:06:46,170 --> 00:06:49,079
So this was the first time that such a story of sexual crimes in the

69
00:06:49,080 --> 00:06:53,430
counterinsurgency against the Myanmar rebels had been laid before a British court.

70
00:06:54,210 --> 00:07:02,630
But for Kenyans, the detail of these claims is all too familiar. In 1998, the publication of political activists one boy, Aki Otieno,

71
00:07:02,640 --> 00:07:10,800
his memoirs had caused a stir with her revelation of her brutal multiple rape at the hands of a British police officer in a detention camp in 1960.

72
00:07:11,970 --> 00:07:15,090
Oceana's experience echoed earlier accounts from the 1950s.

73
00:07:16,170 --> 00:07:18,299
In his biographical account of the rebellion,

74
00:07:18,300 --> 00:07:24,360
Myanmar forest fighter Krishna JAMA poignantly recalled his return to his home in the area after the war,

75
00:07:24,360 --> 00:07:28,470
only to find that his wife had been raped by a member of the local African militia.

76
00:07:28,860 --> 00:07:32,400
But you see your home guard and had born an illegitimate child.

77
00:07:33,300 --> 00:07:40,270
This trope was even taken up by a distinguished Kenya fiction writer who you may known to about a young girl whose rebel hero in a grain of wheat.

78
00:07:40,500 --> 00:07:46,799
Kono returns home to similar circumstances. More recently, from 2002 onwards,

79
00:07:46,800 --> 00:07:54,750
the collection by the Human Kenya Human Rights Commission of testimony on colonial abuses brought to light a growing catalogue of rape accusations.

80
00:07:55,200 --> 00:08:02,700
Similar accounts being highlighted in Caroline Elkins monograph on the story of the British detention camps in Kenya, published in 2005.

81
00:08:03,600 --> 00:08:07,799
Elkins quotes from the oral testimonies of several Kikuyu women who related their

82
00:08:07,800 --> 00:08:11,940
experience of rapes and other sexual assaults while in custody of security personnel,

83
00:08:12,480 --> 00:08:22,200
including events very similar to those of Jane Mara. This paper provides the first documentary evidence from Kenya in the 1950s that

84
00:08:22,200 --> 00:08:26,340
both corroborates and enlarges upon these legal and oral testimonies and memoirs.

85
00:08:27,180 --> 00:08:32,790
Accusations of rapes and sexual assaults by state security personnel are littered throughout the handful of disclosure,

86
00:08:33,630 --> 00:08:40,590
with 9000 files in total, approximately 500 of the files deal specifically with the the way the British dealt with the Kenyan rebellion.

87
00:08:41,640 --> 00:08:49,560
A significant number of these files relate to the investigation and prosecution of allegations against the security forces between 1953 and 1959,

88
00:08:50,070 --> 00:08:57,780
including cases of rape and sexual crimes. So the documentary evidence is quite powerful and important precisely because it relates to

89
00:08:57,780 --> 00:09:03,090
cases where investigations and sometimes prosecutions were initiated by the state at the time.

90
00:09:04,170 --> 00:09:06,780
So the existence of these cases may at first appear surprising.

91
00:09:07,590 --> 00:09:15,090
Legal attitudes to rape in colonial Kenya in the 1950s were generally unsympathetic to prosecution, as they were also in Britain at this time.

92
00:09:15,990 --> 00:09:21,180
While examining these papers for the information they can give us on the character and extent of social sexual crimes,

93
00:09:21,510 --> 00:09:26,400
we must also ask how is it that such cases were brought to the attention of legal officers?

94
00:09:26,430 --> 00:09:32,700
All these assaults were committed upon civilian Kikuyu women by African and British agents of the colonial state.

95
00:09:33,180 --> 00:09:39,840
So the decision to prosecute related to the discipline and control of the security forces more than an interest for the protection of the victim.

96
00:09:40,860 --> 00:09:48,000
As we shall see, the colonial states sought to escape court hearings wherever possible by denying and deflecting evidence,

97
00:09:48,450 --> 00:09:52,859
generally preferring to avoid legal remedies for the colonial authorities.

98
00:09:52,860 --> 00:09:59,070
Rape was, quote, a difficult charge and how they set it themselves among victims to the new outcome.

99
00:09:59,740 --> 00:10:03,940
Suggests reluctance on the part of African women to seek formal prosecution.

100
00:10:04,510 --> 00:10:08,770
This being reinforced by the circumstances of the conflict in which the victims were usually

101
00:10:08,770 --> 00:10:13,810
stigmatised as supporters of the NAMA rebels while the perpetrators were servants of the government.

102
00:10:15,070 --> 00:10:21,610
The evidence on these cases thus provides a unique insight as to the way that rape was treated in a colonial context during the 1950s.

103
00:10:22,090 --> 00:10:29,620
And as to the small but growing literature of that addresses the question of how sexual crimes crimes are or are not prosecuted in wartime.

104
00:10:30,940 --> 00:10:35,559
So to go to what Britain's counterinsurgency campaign was in Kenya,

105
00:10:35,560 --> 00:10:44,420
a brief introduction was enough to between October 1952 and then ended with the ending of the state of emergency that had been occurred in 52.

106
00:10:44,440 --> 00:10:51,850
In 19 January, 1960. So this was against the Myanmar rebellion and has been called the Dirty War.

107
00:10:52,270 --> 00:10:59,620
And it was an estimated 20 to 30000 casualties on the side of the Kikuyu at the height of the campaigns in 1955.

108
00:11:00,010 --> 00:11:06,340
Besides those deceased, over 70,000 Kenyans had also were also held in British prisons and detention camps.

109
00:11:06,760 --> 00:11:10,690
The vast majority being incarcerated without charges having been brought against them.

110
00:11:11,530 --> 00:11:18,340
So Britain concentrated efforts directly among the 1 million Kikuyu speakers of Kenya's central mountain province and Mount Kenya region,

111
00:11:18,790 --> 00:11:22,660
including civilians who are called the passive wing of the NAMA rebellion.

112
00:11:23,350 --> 00:11:30,220
Draconian laws give the police and other security services wide discretionary powers to detain and interrogate suspects,

113
00:11:30,640 --> 00:11:33,760
a process known in Kenya by euphemism of screening.

114
00:11:34,930 --> 00:11:39,400
This led to the reports of random and widespread violence against civilians, including sexual assaults.

115
00:11:39,580 --> 00:11:41,860
From the very earliest months of the conflict.

116
00:11:42,820 --> 00:11:48,460
So the members of the security services active in Kenya emergency can be divided into three separate groups the military,

117
00:11:48,520 --> 00:11:56,739
the police and the home guard. The military was British army regiments who had been deployed to Kenya's work alongside the King's African Rifles,

118
00:11:56,740 --> 00:12:00,040
which was a regiment of African rank and file serving under British officers.

119
00:12:00,730 --> 00:12:08,470
A third military force formation, the Kenya Kenya regiment was made up of 300 or so recruits from the European white settler community,

120
00:12:08,830 --> 00:12:17,980
also playing a prominent role in intelligence gathering and in commanding African auxiliary forces engaged in security, including the Kenya police.

121
00:12:18,880 --> 00:12:23,740
Lastly, the Home Guard was a force of loyal, quote unquote, loyal human.

122
00:12:24,010 --> 00:12:28,380
In 1953 amounted to over 25,000 members.

123
00:12:28,390 --> 00:12:34,090
But by 1954, the British strategy was to pick Kikuyu loyalists against Kikuyu rebels.

124
00:12:34,450 --> 00:12:40,210
The Home Guard was heavily involved in prosecuting the war against civilians, punishing rebels and their alleged supporters alike.

125
00:12:41,320 --> 00:12:47,559
Within the new documentary evidence available, there are many detailed and previously unknown allegations of rape and sexual

126
00:12:47,560 --> 00:12:51,040
assaults made against each wing of the British security services in Kenya.

127
00:12:52,030 --> 00:12:59,410
So to give you an idea of what some of these complaints look like, I'll briefly narrate three different examples of types of allegations.

128
00:13:00,100 --> 00:13:07,180
The first, from May 1953, describes complaints made regarding the, quote, many abuses of the Kikuyu horn home guard,

129
00:13:07,420 --> 00:13:12,700
including rapes of women while they conducted screening of the Long Diani division of the Rift Valley Province.

130
00:13:13,870 --> 00:13:19,630
The official response acknowledged that abuses had taken place but failed to address the specific allegation of rapes.

131
00:13:20,290 --> 00:13:25,720
At the same time, the complainant, a preacher with the local moral rearmament movement in the district,

132
00:13:26,290 --> 00:13:33,640
was privately informed that among the Africans who had told him about these events were some of the suspects, some suspected of man activities.

133
00:13:34,750 --> 00:13:39,790
This is to become a familiar pattern with accusations of rape being dismissed or represented

134
00:13:39,790 --> 00:13:44,050
as malicious efforts to undermine African staff within the colonial administration.

135
00:13:44,890 --> 00:13:52,330
The lone Diana complaint was amongst a larger body of similar allegations that resulted in an internal investigation into the conduct

136
00:13:52,330 --> 00:13:58,600
of the Kikuyu Home Guard in the screening camps and the issuing of instructions to keep tighter control over screening teams.

137
00:13:59,110 --> 00:14:09,670
But rapes were never formally investigated. Another report from January 1955 two women where assaults in the home guard camp at Macadamia in Nairobi.

138
00:14:09,850 --> 00:14:13,660
Objects being inserted into their vaginas in an act of torture and humiliation.

139
00:14:14,500 --> 00:14:19,690
These assaults were perpetrated by a group of Kikuyu women, then living with home guard at the camp.

140
00:14:20,860 --> 00:14:25,840
Investigators describe the assailants as prostitutes who had, quote, thrown their lot in with the government.

141
00:14:26,590 --> 00:14:33,370
Information supplied by these women had been used in security operations and this accounted for their presence under the protection of the Home Guard.

142
00:14:34,480 --> 00:14:38,710
The case did actually come to court and the assailants were convicted by the local magistrate.

143
00:14:39,790 --> 00:14:45,100
Evidence produced at this hearing showed that Chief Kioko, commander of the Home Guard at Masada,

144
00:14:45,730 --> 00:14:48,969
was well aware of the sexual abuse of female mama suspects.

145
00:14:48,970 --> 00:14:50,920
And this was common practice at the camp.

146
00:14:51,820 --> 00:14:59,320
After this incident, Chief Kioko was transferred from Agodi to rural Meru and given the rank of Sergeant Major and a new home guard.

147
00:15:01,090 --> 00:15:03,910
So the last the third example comes from early 1956,

148
00:15:04,600 --> 00:15:10,450
when two women alleged that they had been raped in a labour camp in Machakos district by the African headmen in command of the camp.

149
00:15:11,170 --> 00:15:16,300
Initial investigations revealed that other home guard and tribal police had also raped young girls at the camp.

150
00:15:17,230 --> 00:15:22,990
Yet despite acknowledging that, quote, the headmen took full advantage of the sexual opportunities at his position,

151
00:15:22,990 --> 00:15:28,059
and the temptation of a number of girls presented him with colonial officials elected

152
00:15:28,060 --> 00:15:31,660
not to prosecute because of difficulties establishing the question of consent.

153
00:15:32,620 --> 00:15:37,180
The accused men claimed that the women had consented or the men simply denied the assaults.

154
00:15:38,050 --> 00:15:44,290
With contradictory accounts, lack of medical evidence and no other witnesses willing to give the prospects for conviction remain slim.

155
00:15:45,280 --> 00:15:50,200
So these examples are typical of the many references to such cases in the hands of

156
00:15:50,200 --> 00:15:54,010
disclosure that begin to illustrate the range of issues raised by rape allegations.

157
00:15:55,480 --> 00:16:01,270
I'm going to deal for the rest of the talk with sort of a more coherent picture from the cases

158
00:16:01,270 --> 00:16:06,220
that were formally reported to the Chief Security Complaints Coordinating Committee or the CCXI.

159
00:16:07,480 --> 00:16:11,410
The papers of this committee are amongst the most important sources revealed in the House of Disclosure.

160
00:16:12,010 --> 00:16:15,819
Initially set up in mid-January 1954 as a watch committee to, quote,

161
00:16:15,820 --> 00:16:21,970
receive complaints and ill treatment by members of the security forces and to direct such complaints to the appropriate authorities.

162
00:16:22,630 --> 00:16:29,660
The cases that come from the minutes of the ICC all follow through in investigation and prosecution.

163
00:16:29,740 --> 00:16:31,750
If there was a prosecution or no case,

164
00:16:32,110 --> 00:16:39,700
so we can start to delineate patterns of prosecution or lack of prosecution by dealing with these cases specifically.

165
00:16:40,660 --> 00:16:44,470
So the minutes of the first seven meetings of the SEC are missing.

166
00:16:44,950 --> 00:16:52,810
But from 26th April 1954, until the disbandment of the committee in November 1959, we have a full record of the cases reported.

167
00:16:53,890 --> 00:16:58,060
The Deputy Public Prosecutor and Undersecretary of Defence both attended the CFC.

168
00:16:59,620 --> 00:17:03,819
The minutes were widely circulated copies going to all senior officials in Nairobi,

169
00:17:03,820 --> 00:17:08,650
including the governor and other members of the war council, senior legal officials and ministers.

170
00:17:09,250 --> 00:17:13,540
Copies of them as also came back to London for the attention of the Secretaries of State of the Colonies.

171
00:17:13,960 --> 00:17:17,410
So important that the records of the cases are.

172
00:17:17,410 --> 00:17:21,010
I really need to emphasise that there have been no means represent representative

173
00:17:21,010 --> 00:17:24,730
of a complete account of all accusations made against the security forces.

174
00:17:25,360 --> 00:17:32,200
Only those that had first been formally notified to the Criminal Investigations Department, CID, then came to the CFTC.

175
00:17:33,250 --> 00:17:37,780
In many instances, rape allegations were not the reason for the initial CID investigations,

176
00:17:38,200 --> 00:17:42,580
but only emerged as inquiries through together a more complete picture of the circumstances of the event.

177
00:17:43,580 --> 00:17:47,110
So this tends to suggest that charges were only rarely brought to the side.

178
00:17:47,740 --> 00:17:54,950
Moreover, there are allegations of abuses from within. The detention camps emerged at the time and letters written by detainees and since

179
00:17:55,000 --> 00:17:58,360
activists in Kenya and in Britain who then sought to publicise this events.

180
00:17:58,810 --> 00:18:06,750
Only one such complaint thought of the sexual abuse of a detainee at the women's reception camp in yet found its way to Ccxi.

181
00:18:08,170 --> 00:18:15,640
This was because there was no formal bureaucratic requirement to report complaints from the camps to any specified authority.

182
00:18:15,730 --> 00:18:21,670
In contrast with unexplained death accounts, death in the camps which was required to be notified to the police.

183
00:18:22,420 --> 00:18:26,350
So the experience of women detainees is quite a separate issue altogether.

184
00:18:26,740 --> 00:18:30,940
And while I also investigated the cases of camp based violence, which are numerous,

185
00:18:31,390 --> 00:18:37,450
we decided to keep these narratives separate because of the different nature of the crimes that the perpetrators and prosecution.

186
00:18:38,710 --> 00:18:43,630
So dealing then with the non camp related incidences of sexual assaults.

187
00:18:43,990 --> 00:18:51,220
The court papers now available to us record 56 separate sexual crimes spanning 1954 to 1959.

188
00:18:51,620 --> 00:18:54,860
The details of which I have on a table which I'm going to pass out.

189
00:18:54,880 --> 00:18:59,060
Sorry, I don't have slides, but I do have this table. Yeah.

190
00:18:59,400 --> 00:19:02,830
Yeah. Thank you. That I. Yeah. You have to share.

191
00:19:03,040 --> 00:19:12,519
Everybody can have one, unfortunately. Yeah.

192
00:19:12,520 --> 00:19:19,240
So I evident from this table before you or what was swiftly come before you.

193
00:19:21,520 --> 00:19:28,300
All the crimes that were reported were perpetrated by employees of the Kono administration or members of the security forces.

194
00:19:28,960 --> 00:19:32,140
There are 23 in cases which involve members of the Kenya police.

195
00:19:33,160 --> 00:19:37,990
Another three cases related to the Kenya Police Reserve and three to officers of the prison service.

196
00:19:38,620 --> 00:19:41,860
Tribal police were accused in six cases and home guard and ten.

197
00:19:43,000 --> 00:19:50,280
In another case, the accused was a screening officer. Then the final case, the affiliation of the accused, was not recorded military units.

198
00:19:50,320 --> 00:19:56,140
So that first section, British Army King's African Rifles and the Kenya regiment featured in nine of the cases.

199
00:19:56,950 --> 00:20:05,000
So the incidence of reported cases shows a decline. Towards the end of the period, all but three cases occurred between 1954 and 1957.

200
00:20:05,840 --> 00:20:09,200
So in terms of outcomes, we know that from the 56 investigations,

201
00:20:09,200 --> 00:20:16,700
only 29 cases were prosecuted and that at 2024 cases it was decided there was insufficient evidence to merit prosecution.

202
00:20:18,020 --> 00:20:21,740
In three cases, the records are incomplete and we do not know the outcome.

203
00:20:22,760 --> 00:20:31,760
So that's just gives you an idea of the table. So any interpretation of the sentencing patterns from the Ccxi papers is complicated by a highly

204
00:20:31,760 --> 00:20:36,020
significant change in the sexual offences legislation that was introduced in the emergency.

205
00:20:36,170 --> 00:20:40,160
So it must be mentioned in 1926 in Kenya,

206
00:20:40,370 --> 00:20:44,629
white settler anxieties about the threat posed to white women in Kenya from sexual assault by

207
00:20:44,630 --> 00:20:49,760
black males that the colonial government introduced legislation making rape a capital offence,

208
00:20:50,180 --> 00:20:53,060
meaning that such cases could only be heard before the Supreme Court.

209
00:20:54,230 --> 00:20:58,820
The penal code stipulated that rape was punishable by death or life imprisonment.

210
00:20:58,820 --> 00:21:05,720
The latter extended only even to those found guilty of attempted rape. Must make a little note here, though, that that is only rape of white women.

211
00:21:06,170 --> 00:21:14,180
Rape of black women was considered. The just treatment was three years imprisonment, but it still had to be tried at the Supreme Court.

212
00:21:14,630 --> 00:21:17,930
So that stood. But the treat, the punishments would be different.

213
00:21:19,070 --> 00:21:24,080
There were still disputes about the relevance of the Penal Code and had been passed in 1926.

214
00:21:24,290 --> 00:21:32,330
In 1950s colonies, however, and in 1955, the Kennedy administration quietly amended the penal code to lessen the penalties for rape.

215
00:21:33,590 --> 00:21:40,220
So since passing the is also made, made it to the Supreme Court to not have to hear all rape allegations.

216
00:21:41,240 --> 00:21:46,550
So the passing of the law, the death penalty, had only rarely been handed down in rape cases,

217
00:21:46,910 --> 00:21:51,530
most recently in 1950, when three Africans hanged for the rape of an elderly white woman.

218
00:21:51,590 --> 00:21:55,820
Again, this would only be for a white woman. From December 1955.

219
00:21:55,850 --> 00:21:59,719
Rape allegations no longer needed to go before the Supreme Court and could be heard before

220
00:21:59,720 --> 00:22:04,760
magistrate and the lower court applying a much lower tariff of penalties to those convicted.

221
00:22:05,510 --> 00:22:11,120
So I think it's very important to mention that rape was lessons at this time.

222
00:22:12,080 --> 00:22:19,220
So the 17 rape cases in which convictions recorded by the CC cc in nine cases, the sentences were handed down before the change.

223
00:22:20,000 --> 00:22:24,560
These cases, heard before the end of 1956 were certainly not prosecuted with the full force of law.

224
00:22:24,980 --> 00:22:28,219
And the change in legislation might be seen to reflect the reluctance of Supreme

225
00:22:28,220 --> 00:22:32,450
Court judges to hand down harsh sentences for rape in the context of wartime.

226
00:22:32,900 --> 00:22:36,830
And also, again, go back to this racial distinction between victims.

227
00:22:38,120 --> 00:22:43,370
The reduction in the rate of conviction from 1956 also perhaps suggests that magistrates, too,

228
00:22:43,850 --> 00:22:48,470
in addition to the Supreme Court judges, were unwilling to tackle such cases with much vigour.

229
00:22:49,550 --> 00:22:57,530
So returning to the table, I'd like to discuss the wider context of the rape allegations reflected in these figures from the CSC papers.

230
00:22:57,980 --> 00:23:02,990
For three categories of security services the military, home guard and the police.

231
00:23:03,860 --> 00:23:09,800
Because of limited time today I'm only going to discuss in detail the handling of rape charges against members of the military,

232
00:23:10,250 --> 00:23:14,390
which historically had the most complex attitude to the investigation of rape cases

233
00:23:15,770 --> 00:23:21,170
in the early phase of the emergency from October 1952 through to December 1953.

234
00:23:21,620 --> 00:23:28,100
Abuses by the security forces were widespread Kikuyu women fleeing into Nairobi at night, November 1952,

235
00:23:28,160 --> 00:23:35,060
to avoid the flare up of conflict in rural areas, told the first stories of rape and assault by police officers from the military.

236
00:23:36,020 --> 00:23:41,149
By March 1953, intelligence reports candidly admitted that soldiers were involved in, quote,

237
00:23:41,150 --> 00:23:46,250
inevitable pilfering and molesting of women in operations against the civilian population.

238
00:23:47,630 --> 00:23:52,160
When General Erskine arrived in Kenya in June 1953 to take command of the military,

239
00:23:52,250 --> 00:23:59,180
he was shocked by this ill discipline and issued a warning to his soldiers that allegations made against them would be properly investigated.

240
00:24:00,170 --> 00:24:08,149
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,

241
00:24:08,150 --> 00:24:14,960
it also involved minimising the adverse publicity such cases attracted and the negative effects that they had upon service morale.

242
00:24:15,860 --> 00:24:19,700
Erskine therefore secured an agreement from the Attorney General that cases involving

243
00:24:19,700 --> 00:24:24,500
soldiers would be heard before military courts and would not go before civilian magistrates.

244
00:24:25,550 --> 00:24:29,090
The extent to which the military then pursued these investigations would not be

245
00:24:29,090 --> 00:24:33,710
subject to scrutiny other than the processes of cases being reported to the Ccxi

246
00:24:34,970 --> 00:24:39,530
military reluctance to open up rape allegations to criminal investigation was

247
00:24:39,530 --> 00:24:43,280
vividly seen in the McLean inquiry into the conduct of the British army in Kenya,

248
00:24:43,760 --> 00:24:47,030
held in closed sessions in Nairobi in December 1953.

249
00:24:48,170 --> 00:24:51,950
The terms of reference of this inquiry were restricted to the period of Erskine's command,

250
00:24:52,430 --> 00:24:59,280
meaning that Lieutenant General Sir Kenneth McLean was barred from investigating any reported incident that took place before June.

251
00:24:59,350 --> 00:25:05,640
July 1983, soldiers giving evidence to McClane had to be repeatedly reminded of this general restriction.

252
00:25:06,720 --> 00:25:11,160
Moreover, the McClane inquiry refused to pursue the mentions of rape that were made in evidence,

253
00:25:11,520 --> 00:25:15,720
even telling one witness, quote, That is not the sort of thing we are concerned with.

254
00:25:17,490 --> 00:25:24,060
So despite the fact that the Army categorise rape as a serious offence, bracketing it alongside murder and manslaughter,

255
00:25:24,570 --> 00:25:33,090
a senior officer in the military police told the McLane Inquiry that in Kenya, the army treated rape as a minor crime in the same category as theft.

256
00:25:34,320 --> 00:25:39,780
Whenever rape was committed along with other offences, it was usual for the rape charges to be ignored,

257
00:25:39,780 --> 00:25:47,580
especially if those other offences were deemed more serious. This was most glaring in the notorious case of Tukur in June 1953,

258
00:25:48,300 --> 00:25:52,770
when raped by African soldiers of the King's African Rifles and their two British officers,

259
00:25:53,130 --> 00:25:57,360
led to a confrontation with villagers in which 222 Kikuyu were killed.

260
00:25:58,410 --> 00:26:04,800
Compensation was paid to the families of the deceased, but no public mention was made of the rates that had ignited the incident,

261
00:26:04,920 --> 00:26:09,420
and the military took active steps to suppress information about the event being released.

262
00:26:10,980 --> 00:26:13,500
This features the handling of rape allegations by the military.

263
00:26:13,500 --> 00:26:20,130
Explain why so few were referred to the Ccxi only nine cases being reported over a six year period.

264
00:26:21,150 --> 00:26:29,280
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.

265
00:26:30,270 --> 00:26:33,690
These gang rape cases all followed a similar pattern of investigation.

266
00:26:34,410 --> 00:26:41,790
Each would be reported first through the city and then passed on to military authorities, who then showed a remarkable reluctance to proceed.

267
00:26:43,110 --> 00:26:48,240
Repeated requests from the CCRC for reports on investigations were ignored or excuses offered.

268
00:26:48,930 --> 00:26:55,410
These investigations lay within the military without resolution for periods greater than six months and in one case, for more than a year.

269
00:26:56,550 --> 00:27:03,240
In all four gang rape cases, military investigators ultimately declared that there was insufficient evidence to identify the culprits,

270
00:27:03,540 --> 00:27:12,240
and so the cases were all dropped without judicial action. However, a fifth case of gang rape also from 1954 was handled very differently.

271
00:27:13,050 --> 00:27:19,010
This concerned three British soldiers of the Royal Engineers who are prosecuted by courts martial and convicted,

272
00:27:19,020 --> 00:27:26,339
each being sentenced to six years imprisonment. These were the harshest sentences handed on to any person convicted of rape during the Kenyan

273
00:27:26,340 --> 00:27:32,250
emergency and in marked contrast to the delays in the four king's African rifles gang rape cases.

274
00:27:32,640 --> 00:27:37,290
Only eight weeks elapsed between the notification of this case and the sentences of the convicts.

275
00:27:38,610 --> 00:27:41,580
Evidently, the army could move swiftly, even when it wanted to.

276
00:27:42,660 --> 00:27:49,410
The remaining military rape case from 1954 was an allegation against an individual soldier of the Kenya regiment, a white settler.

277
00:27:50,220 --> 00:27:52,470
The case was also rapidly processed there,

278
00:27:52,470 --> 00:27:58,380
being only four weeks between the notification of the case and the court martial hearing at which the soldier was eventually acquitted.

279
00:27:59,910 --> 00:28:04,379
The archive documents do not offer any explanation for the differences in processing

280
00:28:04,380 --> 00:28:09,210
the four King's African rifles cases and the two concerning British accused from 1954.

281
00:28:09,780 --> 00:28:15,780
But there is an obvious racial distinction. Those cases involving white soldiers were heard through the military courts,

282
00:28:16,170 --> 00:28:21,330
while those involving black African soldiers were the subject delaying prevarication and ultimately deflection.

283
00:28:22,410 --> 00:28:28,320
The reason for this almost certainly lies in the contrast between the prevailing attitudes of the locally recruited King's African rifles,

284
00:28:28,710 --> 00:28:35,730
whose commanders dismissed rape as a trivial offence. What's in their skin sought to protect the British army regiments from further reputational

285
00:28:35,730 --> 00:28:40,470
damage by ensuring that such cases involving British soldiers were properly investigated.

286
00:28:41,730 --> 00:28:45,629
It is difficult, therefore, to avoid the conclusion that the pattern of prosecutions,

287
00:28:45,630 --> 00:28:51,630
how the racial aspect rape allegations made against African rank and file were processed in a different way than

288
00:28:51,630 --> 00:28:57,150
those made against white soldiers of all ranks because different standards of behaviour were applied by the military.

289
00:28:58,800 --> 00:29:04,380
This view is borne out by the remaining three cases involving military personnel spanning 1955 and 1957.

290
00:29:05,430 --> 00:29:11,880
The first, from May 1955, saw a soldier of the row engineers accused of sexual assault against a child at the town of Thika.

291
00:29:12,900 --> 00:29:16,799
Again, this case against a British soldier was rapidly investigated over a period of five

292
00:29:16,800 --> 00:29:20,820
weeks and the decision taken not to prosecute because of contradictory evidence.

293
00:29:22,230 --> 00:29:30,330
One month later, an officer of the Kenya regiment was convicted for court martial after another very speedy investigation by military officers.

294
00:29:30,780 --> 00:29:35,669
He was convicted of indecent assault and discharged after six months of detention in the

295
00:29:35,670 --> 00:29:40,860
final military case reported by the Complaints Coordination Committee from January 1957.

296
00:29:41,130 --> 00:29:44,730
An African private from the King's African rifles was convicted of the attempted

297
00:29:44,730 --> 00:29:48,450
rape of a civilian woman as she was leaving the Lang'ata military camp.

298
00:29:49,200 --> 00:29:54,899
This case having occurred in a non operational context and the civil jurisdiction coming after the

299
00:29:54,900 --> 00:29:59,130
changes made to the penalties for rape in Kenya went before the Magistrate's Court in Nairobi.

300
00:29:59,750 --> 00:30:03,770
Where the conflict received a custodial sentence of 12 months.

301
00:30:04,430 --> 00:30:04,969
Remarkably,

302
00:30:04,970 --> 00:30:11,870
this is the only case recorded of the conviction of rape or sexual assault of an African in the military during and during Kenya's emergency.

303
00:30:13,250 --> 00:30:19,729
So in the case of the Home Guard, well presented frequently in oral testimonies collected moral members of the

304
00:30:19,730 --> 00:30:23,870
Home Guard were rarely prosecuted or even investigated as evident in the table,

305
00:30:23,870 --> 00:30:26,540
with only ten cases brought against home grown members.

306
00:30:27,560 --> 00:30:33,640
It is evident that, similar to instance of rape in the Algerian war in the 1950s, as described by Rafael Branch,

307
00:30:34,400 --> 00:30:38,570
these local militiamen were seen to have not only ample opportunity for sexual crimes,

308
00:30:38,990 --> 00:30:44,270
but also a higher degree of impunity in each of the hunger cases presented the CFTC.

309
00:30:44,600 --> 00:30:49,250
There is a considerable degree of delay, deflection and even suppression of investigations.

310
00:30:50,240 --> 00:30:57,080
There is a common view that prosecutions of Home Guard members were more harmful than helpful, damaging the morale of security services.

311
00:30:57,470 --> 00:31:03,080
Prosecutions could undermine the counterinsurgency campaign, especially among African auxiliaries.

312
00:31:03,920 --> 00:31:06,770
Further squandering investigations and prosecution efforts.

313
00:31:06,770 --> 00:31:16,610
In January 1955, Governor Ali Abdullah barely halted all allegations made against members of the colonial administration by declaring general amnesty.

314
00:31:18,020 --> 00:31:21,620
So aside from the Home Guard and military, the last group prominent on the table is the police.

315
00:31:22,700 --> 00:31:29,720
These police were largely made up of local recruits, and the care of the rape cases brought against the police is remarkably consistent.

316
00:31:30,470 --> 00:31:34,730
Nearly all of these alleged assaults occurred within the police station or in police vehicles.

317
00:31:34,760 --> 00:31:38,480
The women having been apprehended on some minor offences or on suspicion.

318
00:31:39,560 --> 00:31:45,800
The majority of the allegations concerned rape by two or three police officers together, similar to home guard cases.

319
00:31:46,280 --> 00:31:53,330
Tactics of delay and deflection are evident in the police cases of the 14 allegations recorded for 1955 and 1956.

320
00:31:53,540 --> 00:32:01,340
11 went to trial while from nine to 7 to 9, only three out of the 14 alleged assaults were prosecuted.

321
00:32:03,200 --> 00:32:07,070
There's another element to the poor numbers of prosecutions in this instance of rape.

322
00:32:07,880 --> 00:32:12,590
It is very likely that the Kikuyu families of the victims of rape at the hands of Kikuyu home guards

323
00:32:12,980 --> 00:32:17,900
and police perpetrators may have used social remedies as a preferred alternative to legal procedures.

324
00:32:18,710 --> 00:32:27,500
Historian Tabitha Noble describes rape and other forms of sexual assault as having known and well understood social remedies within Kikuyu society.

325
00:32:27,980 --> 00:32:33,740
Both economic and moral impose the community sanction against those who infringe the accepted norms.

326
00:32:34,730 --> 00:32:40,790
I cannot go explains when a rape occurred, quote, It was the clan that was perceived to be the aggrieved party to be appeased,

327
00:32:41,150 --> 00:32:44,570
for the woman had no individual standing in the matter, cultural or legal.

328
00:32:45,410 --> 00:32:50,210
But Claire Robertson concludes that rape in one country was principally considered a violation of property.

329
00:32:51,170 --> 00:32:58,700
So in the 1950s, social remedies in the form of a tariff or compensation payable by those culpable to the family of the victims,

330
00:32:58,700 --> 00:33:03,679
still remained open to and through the existence of accepted social remedies in cases

331
00:33:03,680 --> 00:33:07,010
of rape may have deterred victims from seeking legal redress through the courts.

332
00:33:07,490 --> 00:33:13,490
But the breakdown of social order that the emergency brought to Kikuyu areas made it unlikely that such sanctions could be enforced,

333
00:33:13,970 --> 00:33:17,870
least of all of the victims. These were perceived to be rebels and therefore outcasts.

334
00:33:18,890 --> 00:33:21,680
This is not a matter to which the archival documents speak at all,

335
00:33:22,220 --> 00:33:26,120
but is clearly an issue that other research might address in deepening our understanding

336
00:33:26,120 --> 00:33:29,510
of the response to rape and other sexual crimes in colonial central Kenya.

337
00:33:30,770 --> 00:33:35,179
So I'll conclude the paper now by asking again some of these more general questions about

338
00:33:35,180 --> 00:33:40,489
the relevance of this paper to wider discourses of conflict in place of sexual violence,

339
00:33:40,490 --> 00:33:44,570
as a weapon in militarised forces, and the prosecution of rape in times of war.

340
00:33:45,800 --> 00:33:49,010
While there has always been an awareness of rape prevalence in wartime,

341
00:33:49,580 --> 00:33:54,020
it is really not until the 1990s that these kinds of adults were separately as a weapon of war.

342
00:33:55,040 --> 00:34:03,710
In April 1946, when the International Military Tribunal for the Far East documented the infamous rape of 19 of December 1937,

343
00:34:04,280 --> 00:34:09,530
they estimated that some 20,000 women had been the victims of systematic military race by the Japanese army.

344
00:34:11,030 --> 00:34:15,349
The senior officials held responsible were charged for generality of alleged acts,

345
00:34:15,350 --> 00:34:19,910
quote, carried out in violation of recognised customs and conventions of war,

346
00:34:20,180 --> 00:34:25,940
including mass murder, rape and other barbaric cruelties, but not for specific sexual crimes.

347
00:34:27,410 --> 00:34:32,630
The 1949 Geneva Convention was also explicit in enumerating rape as a distinct violation.

348
00:34:33,560 --> 00:34:38,390
Article 27 stated that women are, quote, protected against any attack on their honour.

349
00:34:38,750 --> 00:34:42,950
In particular, against rape and forced prostitution or any form of indecent assault.

350
00:34:43,730 --> 00:34:49,370
This was seldom treated discreetly by lawyers and prosecuting war crimes over the following years until the 1990s.

351
00:34:50,720 --> 00:34:59,120
Scholars, notably Cynthia and Lou, have shown how military common commanders have worked to manoeuvre rape victims into distinct civilian category.

352
00:34:59,290 --> 00:35:03,220
Is the seek to minimise or exonerate the stigma attached to the crime.

353
00:35:04,120 --> 00:35:08,260
The military deploy rape, she argues, to assist in their own military causes.

354
00:35:09,100 --> 00:35:11,940
Segregation of rape perpetrators in Kenya.

355
00:35:11,950 --> 00:35:17,440
It's a different institutional and racial categories, and that's be seen as an illustration of a most central argument.

356
00:35:18,400 --> 00:35:25,240
The reluctance to prosecute rape in Kenya in the 1950s was not banned because of a lack of awareness of the significance of rape in wartime.

357
00:35:25,630 --> 00:35:31,180
But it does fit with the broader pattern of denial from this period. Susan Brown Miller.

358
00:35:31,480 --> 00:35:41,950
In her pioneering study of the Pakistan army's invasion of Bangladesh in 1971, where an estimated 300,000 civilian women were raped by soldiers,

359
00:35:42,770 --> 00:35:48,370
she she's argue that contemporary evidence on rape and conflicts in the 20th century is not even difficult to come by.

360
00:35:48,940 --> 00:35:57,999
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,

361
00:35:58,000 --> 00:36:03,730
quote, Our own army and the British army, along with ours, have done their share of looting and raping.

362
00:36:04,240 --> 00:36:11,530
We, too, are considered an army of rapists. For the Vietnam War, too, after three decades of official amnesia.

363
00:36:12,160 --> 00:36:16,030
We now have Gina Weaver's 2010 monograph on rape on the US Army.

364
00:36:16,990 --> 00:36:25,230
Alarmed by American silence over these sexual crimes. Weaver nonetheless located volumes of testimony on America's dirty secret, including, quote,

365
00:36:25,570 --> 00:36:31,209
the horrific and detailed accounts of sexual violence from U.S. Army veterans recorded in the Winter

366
00:36:31,210 --> 00:36:36,910
Soldier investigation of January 1971 and logged on the Congressional Record later that year.

367
00:36:38,050 --> 00:36:43,390
So as journalist and historian Nick Turse has observed, America has known these things all along.

368
00:36:43,720 --> 00:36:52,180
So why then to take 40 years for them to be written about and discussed since the opening of rape discourses with the Balkans Rwandan conflicts?

369
00:36:52,360 --> 00:36:57,220
Historians are thankfully reconsidering histories of the place and prevalence of rape and past wars.

370
00:36:57,970 --> 00:37:02,050
But this does not change the fact of how poorly these kinds of prosecuted before 1990.

371
00:37:02,860 --> 00:37:09,190
Also, as I mentioned at the start of this paper, we must be careful to not generalise discourses of rape based on a balkanised model.

372
00:37:10,420 --> 00:37:13,750
Rape is not the same mass weapon of war in each and every conflict.

373
00:37:14,310 --> 00:37:18,310
That does not mean that it does not occur or that its prevalence should be overlooked and trivialised.

374
00:37:19,300 --> 00:37:23,860
There's no single explanation for how and when rape during wartime will be prosecuted.

375
00:37:24,610 --> 00:37:32,500
Historical record from Kenya and elsewhere suggests that regardless of frequency, severity or even verifiability of victims claims,

376
00:37:32,680 --> 00:37:37,720
wartime rape is often only prosecuted when it is politically or military expedient to do so.

377
00:37:38,500 --> 00:37:40,810
So thanks. I'll now answer some questions.