Rehabilitating an Empire

Humanitarian Collusion with the Colonial State during the Kenyan Emergency, ca. 1954-1960

Datos Bibliográficos

ID5779500
AutoresEmily Baughan (autor de correspondencia)
Año2020
Volumen59
Número1
Páginas57-79
Fecha de publicación2020-01-01
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessSí
TipoARTICLE
RevistaJournal of British Studies (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 0021-9371 • E-ISSN: 1545-6986
EditorialCambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1017/jbr.2019.243
OpenAlexW2953700889
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas8
Referencias citadas46

During the Kenyan Emergency of 1952-1960, one of the most violent episodes in the history of the British Empire, humanitarian organizations colluded with the colonial state to shore up British power. This article examines how aid agencies that claimed to exemplify the progressive internationalism of the postwar period participated in colonial violence. Far from condemning the brutality of the imprisonment and torture during the Kenyan Emergency, aid organizations were deeply implicated in parallel projects for women and children that sought to achieve the same objectives: the remaking of Kikuyu hearts and minds and the weakening of anticolonial resistance. Far from acting as a check on colonial violence in an era of burgeoning rights discourses in 1950s Kenya, self-proclaimed "impartial" internationalist organizations, while claiming to uphold values of universal humanity, worked as auxiliaries to the colonial counterinsurgency. Taking their cue from military counterinsurgency in 1950s Malaya, humanitarians sought to win "hearts and minds" and undertook material provision for imprisoned anticolonial activists and their families on behalf of the colonial state. They did so by importing new humanitarian expertise developed in wartime Europe and adapting it to fit within racist, colonial norms. In providing this allegedly impartial expertise, humanitarian organizations lent credence to the myth that rehabilitation in Kenya was a progressive program enacted by a liberal empire to modernize its subjects, rather than a ruthless attempt to stymie anticolonial resistance by any means necessary. In this case, postwar humanitarian internationalism did not challenge colonial brutality but enabled it

British Empire · Internationalism · Kenya · African history and culture studies · Historical and Contemporary Political Dynamics · North African History and Literature