Radiolab: "Mau Mau"
Episode Date: July 3, 2015
Hosts: Jad Abumrad & Robert Krulwich
Featured Contributors: Katie Engelhardt (Vice News), David Anderson (historian), Caroline Elkins (historian), Jamie York (producer)

Main Theme

This episode of Radiolab explores the long-suppressed, brutally complex history of the Mau Mau uprising in colonial Kenya—a story buried for decades in secret British archives. Through personal testimonies, investigative journalism, and newly uncovered documents, the episode traces how the official narrative of "savage rebels" came to dominate public memory, the atrocities committed by both sides, and how a historic lawsuit forced the British government to finally acknowledge its dark colonial past.

Episode Outline & Key Sections

1. The Secret Archive at Hanslope Park

Timestamps: [01:38]–[04:18]

• Introduction to Hanslope Park, a secretive government compound in Buckinghamshire, England, storing sensitive colonial documents.
• Producer Jamie York visits, gets stopped by security:

  “Are you in a car? … I’m not comfortable with any of this activity you’re doing.” — [03:49], security guard to Jamie York

• Legends that archives there could “rewrite 200 years of history” ([04:18]).
• Purpose: Sets the stage for an untold history waiting to be discovered.

2. Kenya Under British Rule & the Roots of the Mau Mau

Timestamps: [05:03]–[08:45]

• Historian David Anderson describes romanticized British views of Kenya and the systematic displacement of native Kikuyu people.
• Caroline Elkins, Harvard historian, explains “land and labor” problems and creation of “native reserves”:

  “They solved the land problem by simply alienating it and giving it to the white farmers... [Natives] forced off their land into slums.” — Caroline Elkins, [06:14]

• WWII veterans (Kikuyu) expect change after returning from serving Britain; conditions worsen ([07:19]).

3. Origins of Mau Mau Rebellion & British Crackdown

Timestamps: [07:32]–[13:14]

• Kikuyu veterans swear secret oaths to expel Europeans (“If I don't, may this oath kill me.” — [08:02]).
• Escalation: livestock hamstrung, property destroyed, use of gruesome oaths to terrify settlers.
• Mau Mau attacks against “loyalists” and settlers, culminating in the shocking murder of the Ruck family ([09:47]).
• Mau Mau becomes entrenched as “pure evil” in colonial and regional consciousness; even used as a “boogeyman” by parents ([10:50]-[11:26]).

  “Just the word Mau Mau would make us run, crawl under the bed.” — Latif Nasser’s mother, [11:26]

• The British respond with overwhelming force, but for years a “blank spot” remains regarding what happened during the crackdown ([12:31]-[13:14]).

4. Destruction & Disappearance of Colonial Records

Timestamps: [13:14]–[14:05]

• When Britain abandoned its colonies, documents were systematically destroyed (“stories of papers being...packed into boxes and dropped at sea...burned.” — Katie Engelhardt, [13:28]).
• Notoriously, historians remark on the smoke from document bonfires in Delhi during Indian independence ([13:36]).
• The historical record was “blank”—the accepted story of the “evil Mau Mau” endured due to lack of evidence ([13:51]).

5. Caroline Elkins’ Investigations & Oral Histories

Timestamps: [14:05]–[18:47]

• Princeton undergraduate Caroline Elkins’s early 1990s research uncovers unexplained files about a women’s detention camp near Nairobi.
• Returns to Kenya, begins piecing together hundreds of oral histories from village to village for years.

  “Stories...You can’t imagine.” — Caroline Elkins, [17:29]

• The magnitude and specificity of these stories hint at a much wider and systematically brutal operation than the records suggest.

6. What Really Happened: Mass Detentions, “Prison Villages,” and Systemic Brutality

Timestamps: [22:54]–[31:08]

• Producer Jamie York, with Terry Oirimu (translator from Elkins’ research), visits Kenyan countryside; finds elderly women who all identify as Mau Mau ([23:49]-[24:53]).
• Elkins’s big realization: The Mau Mau was a mass movement, not just a small band of militants ([25:17]).
• Post-Ruck family murder, British create “prison villages”—over 800 barbed-wire-enclosed camps for women/children, men sent to detention camps ([25:42]).
• Detention system described as a psychological “pipeline” requiring confessions in exchange for better conditions ([26:05]–[27:23]):

  “They want us to say loudly that we forsake the Mau Mau struggle. But we refused.” — Gitu wa Kahengeri, [27:57]

• Children act as message-runners between captives and fighters ([28:12]).
• Shocking, common accounts of torture, including sexual violence and beatings:

  “Naked, tied by his feet...brutally beaten on the testicles with a stick...they seared his eyes with hot coals.” — BBC doc testimony, [29:04] “That act still gives me nightmares to this day...That was something that should never be done to a human being.” — Former detainee, [29:59]

• Scale of British repression: up to a million and a half Kikuyu detained/tortured/murdered, while only 32 Europeans killed ([30:44]-[31:06]).

7. Suppression of the Story in Independent Kenya

Timestamps: [31:08]–[32:03]

• Jomo Kenyatta, post-independence, suppresses Mau Mau legacy, calling them “hooligans”; British-era ban on Mau Mau remains in effect until 2002.
• The narrative remains one-sided, and oral histories like Elkins’s are dismissed as “fiction” because “there is no story here” ([32:31]).

8. The Lawsuit That Changed Everything

Timestamps: [33:07]–[39:05]

• In 2009, Mau Mau veterans, relying on Elkins’s book, sue the British government for torture ([33:19]; [33:34]).
• Case was weak due to lack of documentary evidence—until legal historian David Anderson finds clues that secret files were shipped to Britain.
• A judge’s threat leads to the unsealing of 300 boxes of files from Hanslope Park ([37:37]–[38:20]).
• Discovered documents included: orders to round up fighters, memos about torture (“roasted alive”), pleading letters from detainees ([38:44]–[39:05]).
• Settlement: ~£20 million paid to living survivors—about $4,600 each.

9. Why Save the Evidence? & “Hidden Histories” Worldwide

Timestamps: [39:14]–[43:16]

• Some British officials kept the most damning files to prove not all were complicit ([39:19]).

  “Some of the British officers in Kenya saved the files precisely because they were damning…to show that not all the European staff in Kenya had been happy with compulsive force.” — David Anderson, [39:56]

• Subsequent releases reveal vast troves—“15 miles” of documents, affecting 37 former colonies ([40:18]-[41:05]).
• Other colonial flashpoints: Malaya, Cyprus, Palestine, Hong Kong (over 250,000 documents on Hong Kong alone, [42:17]).
• Declassification process is agonizingly slow:

  “Sip. Redact. Sip. Redact. … By the time these files finally see the light of day, it will not be within my lifetime. It could literally be hundreds of years.” — Katie Engelhardt, [43:10]; [43:16]

10. Aftermath and Lingering Injustice

Timestamps: [43:23]–[47:13]

• British government’s official acknowledgement and court apology was deeply meaningful for the handful of elderly plaintiffs:

  “For them to get that triumph was remarkable, remarkable.” — David Anderson, [44:33]

• But almost no one in Kenya knew of, or received benefit from, the settlement:

  “A lot of them were like, ‘What settlement?’… What they need isn’t so much an acknowledgement, it’s to get back what was taken…pieces of land.” — Jamie York, [45:23]-[46:22]

Notable Quotes

• On the power of suppressed memory:

  "Just the word Mau Mau would make us run, crawl under the bed." — Latif Nasser’s mother ([11:26])

• On the mass systematization of abuse:

  “Prison villages…The village was like a concentration camp…Some 800 barbed wire villages throughout Central Province, Kenya.” — Caroline Elkins ([25:51])

• On concluding why the archives matter:

  “I mean, this is like a rewriting of history, essentially.” — Jad Abumrad ([41:35])

• On what survivors wanted most:

  “What mattered to these people was not a financial settlement… but rather acknowledgement, just simple acknowledgement that these things had been done to them.” — David Anderson ([44:33])

• On historical responsibility:

  “What they need isn’t so much acknowledgement, it’s to get back what was taken from them … pieces of land, a place where one can keep some goats or cows.” — Interviewee via Jamie York ([46:11])

• On the slow march toward transparency:

  “At the rate we’re going…by the time these files finally see the light of day, it will not be within my lifetime. It could literally be hundreds of years.” — Katie Engelhardt ([43:16])

Memorable Moments/Tone

• The episode’s mood shifts from journalistic curiosity and suspense (Hanslope Park’s secrets), to horror and heartbreak (accounts of torture and mass incarceration), to bittersweet victory and ongoing frustration (the meager, slow justice for survivors).
• The show’s trademark sound design brings snippets of newsreels, oral history, and courtroom scenes into a vivid, emotionally resonant whole.
• There’s a persistent theme of the agency and dignity in survivors’ voices—and the persistent obstacles erected by official memory, bureaucracy, and geopolitical interests.

Summary

"Mau Mau" is a powerful excavation of a near-lost history: how Britain’s imperial narrative about the “savage” Mau Mau rebellion concealed decades of systematic brutality, and how a mix of dogged research, oral history, and legal pressure cracked open one of the 20th century’s most tightly sealed vaults. The episode not only exposes the pain and complexity of colonial violence in Kenya, but also shows how battles over memory and documentation shape national narratives everywhere. While some elderly survivors received a thin measure of justice, for most, true restoration remains out of reach—a stark reminder that facing the past is a long, unfinished process.

Recommended listening for anyone interested in history, human rights, and how truth is sometimes buried—then rediscovered, one box at a time.