Barack Obama, in his pre-presidency memoir Memories of My Father, mentions an encounter with an affable white English couple on his first visit to his father’s homeland Kenya. The couple were regular visitors to Kenya, the husband having spent his childhood there. When the young Obama asked them if they’d consider moving back, the husband demurred, saying that “the sins of the father” meant it would be difficult. He was speaking figuratively but his intent was clear.
Former BBC correspondent Nicholas Rankin also spent his childhood in Kenya, in the 1950s when his father was managing a colonial estate, and recalls it as a pleasant idyll, perhaps because his parents sufficiently shielded him and his siblings from the surrounding strife of the Mau Mau uprising and the ugly crackdown by the British colonial authorities.
In Trapped in History, Rankin takes an objective look at the country he once called home, interweaving his own family history and that of Kenya since the arrival of the British in 1888. The British are portrayed as dissolute and feckless, taking liberties that would never have been possible back home. The natives chafed under British rule from the off, and a string of isolated uprisings eventually culminated in the Mau Mau in the 1950s, which carried out guerrilla attacks on British interests.
The British responded with mass deportations and internment and killed an estimated 20,000 Mau Mau, mainly ethnic Kikuyu. A further 30,000 civilians died due to the humanitarian catastrophe. The Mau Mau were defeated but the demands of Jomo Kenyatta’s Kenya African Union were ultimately met and Kenya got its independence in 1963, at which point the Rankins returned to the UK, along with most the other European settlers.
You sense that Rankin might have written a different book two or three decades ago, and he admits to evolving in his understanding of the British colonialism that led his family to live in Kenya. Trapped in History is particularly imbued with a spirit of criticism and shrewdly puts Kenya’s history in the context of the wider wave of decolonisation that swept the world at the time. All in all, it’s an engaging and elegantly written account of life in a country that is oddly overlooked in much of the western media.
