One more for good measure
One more clip from this weeks LRB for good measure. How about this gem from Bernard Porter’s review of two new books on the Kenya Emergency and the end of the British Empire…
[A]fter the scandalous British beatings of detainees at Hola camp in
1959, which left 11 dead and 60 seriously wounded… Alan Lennox-Boyd, colonial secretary for much of this
period, and one of the villains of both these books… [at first] denied abuses, then when that was no longer
possible he dismissed them as exceptional (‘bad apples’), and appealed
to his critics to remember what they were up against in Kenya: not an
ordinary policing problem, but an outbreak of atavistic ‘evil’ – a
useful word when you are confronting something you don’t understand.
Familiar ring to it, no?
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