Britain 'shamed' on Mau Mau

BRITAIN used mass detention without trial and sadistic violence far more than previously thought to quell the Mau Mau revolt in 1950s Kenya, according to the latest research.

Oxford historian David Anderson and Caroline Elkins, of Harvard University, have uncovered more details of atrocities during Britain’s dirty war against the insurgency.

According to official figures more than 11,000 rebels were killed, along with up to 100 Europeans and as many as 2,000 African loyalists.

But Ms Elkins suspects the figure for rebel deaths is a considerable underestimate.

"I now believe there was in late colonial Kenya a murderous campaign to eliminate Kikuyu people that left tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands dead," she writes in a new book, Britain’s Gulag.