We only went to Kenya because a Nairobi businessman fumbled in his jacket pocket. His car keys snagged the trigger of his Beretta, and he shot himself in the stomach. My father got his job.

In 1953, before Queen Elizabeth II was crowned, most British people did not walk around with loaded pistols in their pockets. But things were going badly wrong in Kenya Colony. The governor had declared a ‘State of Emergency’ and called in the army in support of the civil power. The fear of black terrorism – ‘Mau Mau gangs’ – was driving the white minority to arm themselves. There would be a lot more killing.

Empire stories are always mixed messages, with bad and good, fear and love, cruelty and beauty intertwined. This book is my personal mash-up, reader: memories of childhood overlaid with what I have learned as an adult, a coming to terms with some of the imperial ghosts that still haunt British psyches.

I always used to say I had a happy childhood. (The psychotherapist Oliver James remarks that many of his disturbed patients say exactly the same thing.) But as the settled pond-mud of the past gets stirred up, you start to wonder about the reality, and the price, of that early happiness. Doubt begins trickling in. The remembered sunny spots where I grew up in East Africa were tiny clearings in the larger selva oscura of the British Empire. I felt a growing need to go back into that dark wood, to pick my own way through its branching narratives, the stories I was told and taught, the things I believed to be true that perhaps were not. The child may have known nothing, but the adult does not have that excuse. ‘For these innocent people have no other hope,’ wrote James Baldwin in The Fire Next Time: ‘They are, in effect, still trapped in a history which they do not understand; and until they understand it, they cannot be released from it.’

And who am I, to tell these tales? A post-war baby-boomer, third son and middle child of five from an English mother and a Scottish father, born lower-upper-middle-class in northern England in 1950, the midpoint of the twentieth century. The place where I grew up from 1954 onwards, Kenya Colony and Protectorate, is another country – ‘So long, / So far away / Is Africa’ as Langston Hughes wrote. But the place made me who I am and it is somewhere I feel compelled to revisit in heart and mind and memory before I die.

For decades I put it all behind me. Like the UK itself, I turned my back on the British colonial past because it had become embarrassing. ‘Colonialism is now a dirty word,’ Elspeth Huxley wrote, ‘arousing feelings of indignation in black breasts and guilt in white ones.’ That was in 1990, when I was working at BBC World Service, but not particularly choosing to share my past with Bush House colleagues. Elspeth Huxley was only echoing what Margery Perham had observed in her first Reith Lecture for the BBC in 1961, that colonialism was now a term of abuse, ‘nearly always coupled with imperialism as if to make sure that the abuse is all-inclusive’.

In December 1962, when I was twelve and a half, the American statesman Dean Acheson pronounced: ‘Great Britain has lost an Empire and has not yet found a role.’ I was fourteen and a half when the British Empire seemed finally interred with Sir Winston Churchill in Bladon churchyard. In my early twenties the UK joined the European Common Market and we turned our national face to our neighbours on ‘the Continent’. I did not look back much at my African childhood. I read English at Oxford; ‘post-colonial studies’ did not yet exist. It all seemed as dead and buried as Cecil Rhodes.

But the past has not passed, nor does its grip diminish. ‘What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow / Out of this stony rubbish?’ In the twenty-first century, the violence of colonial Kenya began to bubble back up into wider public consciousness. In 2000, a group of former Mau Mau detainees demanded £60 billion compensation from Britain. At an anti-racist UNESCO conference in Durban in 2001 there was more talk of monetary amends for slavery and apartheid. In late 2002, I watched a disturbing BBC TV documentary called Kenya: White Terror. Early in 2005 two controversial history books appeared. Britain’s Gulag: The Brutal End of Empire in Kenya was by an American, Caroline Elkins, who featured in the BBC programme. In an article about his outstanding book, Histories of the Hanged: Britain’s Dirty War in Kenya and the End of the Empire, David M. Anderson drew parallels with the abuses of the United States’ current ‘Global War on Terror’. My brother and I felt uneasy. Was this our past?

Both Elkins and Anderson were expert witnesses at the High Court in London when three elderly Kenyans sued the British government for the sufferings and torture they had endured as detainees during the Mau Mau rebellion. They were supported by another academic, Huw Bennett, author of Fighting the Mau Mau: The British Army and Counter-Insurgency in the Kenya Emergency. One long witness statement came from a former district officer in Kenya called John Cato Nottingham, co-author of the 1966 book The Myth of ‘Mau Mau’: Nationalism in Kenya, who had a similar background to me but who had stayed in Kenya and married a Kikuyu woman.

In July 2011, Mr Justice McCombe judged that the British government had a case to answer in relation to charges of systematic torture, beatings and sexual abuse during the ‘Emergency’ in Kenya. One of the plaintiffs, Jane Muthoni Mara, said: ‘I do not understand why I was treated with such brutality for simply having provided food to the Mau Mau … These crimes cannot go unpunished and forgotten.’ The Guardian reported that US President Barack Obama’s Luo grandfather, Hussein Onyango Obama, was among the Africans who had suffered. The Times revealed that the Foreign Office had cached secret papers, more than 8,000 files from thirty-seven colonies, including 17,000 potentially embarrassing pages from Kenya, at a country house in Buckinghamshire called Hanslope Park, a wartime radio intercept station for the Secret Intelligence Service still known to locals as ‘Spook Central’. A top colonial lawyer had justified this at the time: ‘If we are to sin, we must sin quietly.’

Finally, the authorities stopped defending the indefensible. On 6 June 2013, the British foreign secretary, William Hague, made a statement to the House of Commons, admitting torture and ill-treatment in Kenya, while denying legal liability. ‘The British government sincerely regrets that these abuses took place,’ he said, offering to pay nearly £20 million in costs and compensation to more than 5,200 Kenyans. The hope was to draw a final line under the atrocities in time for the fiftieth anniversary of Kenya’s independence.

But a mere ‘statement of regret’ did not satisfy the CARICOM Reparations Commission, established the following month by fifteen Caribbean nations seeking justice from Britain and other countries for genocide, slavery, slave-trading and racial apartheid. ‘A full formal apology’ was top of its ten-point action plan, although the islands have not yet received it. When the British prime minister David Cameron was in Jamaica in September 2015 he did not manage to say sorry, but expressed the hope that ‘we can move on from this painful legacy’. In his speech at the ceremony marking Barbados becoming a republic in November 2021, the then Prince Charles mentioned ‘the appalling atrocity of slavery, which forever stains our history’.

The first decades of the twenty-first century saw renewed ferocity in the culture wars over big ideas: imperialism, Western civilisation, racism. Forty thousand more claimants in Kenya wanted compensation. An Indian writer feuded with a British historian over his TV series about the British Empire. Universities bubbled with the angers of identity politics. There were calls to decolonise the curriculum. The Rhodes Must Fall protest movement, which began in South Africa in 2015, spread to Oxford, where undergraduates tried to remove a statue of Cecil Rhodes as an emblem of colonial oppression, and a theologian was denounced for his ‘Ethics and Empire’ project. Students in Manchester painted over the poem ‘If’ by Rudyard Kipling on the walls of their Union because, they said, its author ‘sought to legitimate the British Empire’s presence in India and dehumanise people of colour’. University of Ghana lecturers objected to a statue of Gandhi because he was ‘racist’. The University of Cambridge questioned its past links with the slave trade. Glasgow University apologised for its own. Then, in June 2020, following the killing of George Floyd, the Black Lives Matter movement went global.

‘The confession of unawareness is a confession of guilt,’ the Barbadian George Lamming wrote in his analysis of the colonial relation, The Pleasures of Exile. ‘Awareness is a minimum condition for attaining freedom.’ Starting my journey back into one of the last British colonial childhoods, I realise I am much the same...