[RADIOLAB INTRO]

JAD ABUMRAD: Hey, I'm Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT KRULWICH: I'm Robert Krulwich.

JAD: This is Radiolab. Today we're gonna start off with a building.

ROBERT: Not just any building, but a building that is heavy with secrets.

KATIE ENGELHART: Yeah.

JAD: And it's a building we first really learned about, or at least got a picture of, from this woman.

KATIE ENGELHART: Katie Engelhart. I'm a reporter at Vice News in London.

JAD: And Katie, like now all of us at Radiolab is ...

KATIE ENGELHART: Obsessed. Devastatingly obsessed.

JAD: ... with this place called Hanslope Park.

KATIE ENGELHART: So Hanslope Park is this huge, sprawling complex in Buckinghamshire, near a town called Milton Keynes.

JAD: Which isn't too far from London. And our producer, Jamie York, happened to be in London on vacation. So we asked him, well why don't you just grab your tape recorder and go down there?

JAMIE YORK: Yeah, let's do this.

ROBERT: Check it out.

KATIE ENGELHART: So it's a bit of a drive from London.

JAD: About an hour and a half on the M1, M2.

KATIE ENGELHART: You approach this sort of beautiful town with adorable little posh cottages and little pubs.

JAMIE: I'm not from around here. I'm looking for Hanslope Park.

KATIE ENGELHART: I mean, it's your sort of typical, ye olde British village.

GUARD: It won't shake the guard dogs. Very secure place.

JAD: About a four-minute drive past that ye olde town, you go through some fields, crest over a hill, and there it is. This massive, massive building surrounded by razor wire.

JAMIE: Let's see what's going on here.

KATIE ENGELHART: So the archives are held in a purpose built building from the '90s.

JAD: And these are archives, by the way, from the largest empire ever known.

KATIE ENGELHART: It's like if you were creating a movie set for like a secretive government compound where they keep secret files, you would literally just make this.

ROBERT: Jamie parked a quarter mile away, and walked up to the gate.

JAMIE: There's a big, it looks like electrified fence.

ROBERT: Through the gate.

JAMIE: Taller than me.

JAD: And past these traffic spikes.

ROBERT: And just as he barely stepped inside ...

GUARD: Are you in a car?

JAMIE: I am.

GUARD: Just come back to your car. I'm not comfortable with any of this activity you're doing.

JAD: A guard grabs him, takes him to a guardhouse.

GUARD: Well can I just ask what that is?

JAMIE: It's a microphone.

GUARD: Could you just disconnect it while you're in here though, please?

ROBERT: And then ...

GUARD: Where is your vehicle?

JAMIE: Oh, it's down ...

GUARD: Right. Okay.

ROBERT: They walk him ...

JAMIE: Are you going to escort me all the way back to my car?

ROBERT: ... the entire quarter mile back to his car.

JAD: Now we've heard it said that the files in that building, if they were ever released, could rewrite 200 years of history. No idea if that's true.

KATIE ENGELHART: We just don't know.

JAD: But we're starting to know.

ROBERT: And today we're gonna focus on the one story that has so far, anyway, tumbled out kind of by accident.

JAD: And it's a story that we find kind of startling. And we should also warn that there's some stuff coming up that is graphic and disturbing. So if you're listening with kids, you might want to skip this one. Though if you're not listening with kids, don't skip it. Don't skip it. Okay.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Our story is of Kenya.]

DAVID ANDERSON: Kenya was always seen ...

JAD: This is Historian David Anderson.

DAVID ANDERSON: In a kind of sepia-tinted haze.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Many years ago came white men of adventure, pioneers who found the country beautiful, the climate kind, and the soil fertile.]

DAVID ANDERSON: Bougainvillea, sunshine, smiling, happy servants.

JAD: David says that in the 1910s, '20s, '30s, the British public was obsessed with Kenya. You had books, eventually ...

DAVID ANDERSON: Television programs.

JAD: It was one of the crown jewels of the empire. And so you had all of these Brits leaving Britain and going to Kenya to start a new life.

DAVID ANDERSON: And many of the settlers who flocked out to Kenya were lower-middle classes who could have a much better salary and a much better living standard in Kenya than they ever could back at home.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: They stayed and founded the young colony, where men make their homes, where their children are born, taught, and grow strong and healthy.]

JAD: Now it probably goes without saying that this new life of the British citizen came at the expense of the Kenyan who was already living there.

CAROLINE ELKINS: Two problems that were always encountered in Africa, and in general with colonization is the issue of land, and the issue of labor.

JAD: That's Harvard historian Caroline Elkins. She'll play a big role in our story.

CAROLINE ELKINS: So in Kenya they solved the land problem by simply alienating it and giving it to the white farmers. It then becomes the labor problem. How do you force Africans to labor cheaply on plantations? Right? Like in this case tea and coffee. Well, the way you do it is you create what are called "native reserves." We had them here for Native Americans.

JAD: She basically says that the native Kenyans were forced off their land into slums, where they could barely eke out a living. And so the only option they had was to work for the white people. And that's how it went ...

CAROLINE ELKINS: For decades.

JAD: Until ...

CAROLINE ELKINS: The Second World War.

[NEWS CLIP: Acts of aggression have started. War clouds gather.]

JAD: 1939.

CAROLINE ELKINS: Suddenly, thousands and thousands of men ...

JAD: Young Kenyan men are forced into war.

[NEWS CLIP: The people of Africa are doing excellent work to help the allied cause.]

JAD: Many get thrown into the British army.

CAROLINE ELKINS: King's African rivals.

[NEWS CLIP: Among the finest troops in the empire.]

CAROLINE ELKINS: Where they came into contact with ideas of independence. And they anticipated when they returned ...

[NEWS CLIP: Today is Victory in Europe Day.]

CAROLINE ELKINS: ... that they would have access to land, that their conditions would be getting better. But nope, they find their condition has not only not gotten better, it's gotten worse.

JAD: And so after the war, a few of these vets from the largest ethnic group in Kenya ...

CAROLINE ELKINS: Called the Kikuyu.

JAD: ... they get together.

CAROLINE ELKINS: And they decide to take an oath. Now oathing is traditional amongst the Kikuyu. So for example, men a hundred years ago or more would take an oath pledging allegiance to their ethnic group as they went to war with somebody else. In this case, they'd take an oath, pledging themselves to kick all Europeans out of the colony. And then the oath goes something like this: I pledge to kick all Europeans out of the colony, out of Kenya. And if I don't, may this oath kill me. I pledge to take up arms against the Europeans. If I don't, may this oath kill me. Now of course, the last thing that was said was always was if I reveal the contents of this oath, may this oath kill me.

JAD: She says the first thing they did was attack the settlers' livestock.

CAROLINE ELKINS: Doing things like hamstringing cattle.

ROBERT: Hamstringing cattle?

CAROLINE ELKINS: Cut their hamstrings.

ROBERT: Oh, cut their hamstrings.

CAROLINE ELKINS: So they can't walk.

JAD: They start destroying property. Their oaths started to involve things like ...

CAROLINE ELKINS: Goat eyeballs, ram scrotums, intestines, blood, things that absolutely repulse the local European settlers and put terror into them.

JAD: And why do they end up calling themselves the Mau Mau?

CAROLINE ELKINS: Ah, it's a good question. It's the etymology of that is much debated, with nobody quite agreeing on how it came to pass. But Mau Mau is, many think, is a Swahili derivative of sort of more and more. That there was—some say it has to do with Europeans, and I don't believe this one, overhearing what was the Mau Mau oath.

JAD: Whatever was the case, in 1952, the colonial government, which was sort of the British arm in Kenya, they declare a state of emergency.

CAROLINE ELKINS: And those pledging allegiance to the Mau Mau ...

JAD: They escalate.

CAROLINE ELKINS: ... they start going after the loyalists.

JAD: The Kenyans who'd been helping the settlers.

[NEWS CLIP: Savagely attacking the defenseless.]

ROBERT: Shooting them or ...

CAROLINE ELKINS: Oh yeah. They murdered them.

JAD: One assassination after the next.

[NEWS CLIP: Men and women with their bodies carved forever.]

JAD: They raid loyalist villages ...

[NEWS CLIP: With clubs, knives and fire.]

JAD: And the British?

CAROLINE ELKINS: They're terrified.

[NEWS CLIP: Troops are in the streets of Nairobi.]

CAROLINE ELKINS: This is the night of long knives, coming into reality. And it's only about to get worse.

JAD: And that happens on the night of January 24, 1953.

CAROLINE ELKINS: Which was the murder of the Ruck family. The Rucks were these very young, lovely couple.

JAD: Roger Ruck was a farmer. Esme Ruck was a doctor who actually administered to the local population. And they had a little boy named Michael, who was six.

CAROLINE ELKINS: Just that day, the little boy had fallen off his pony, and one of their trusted servants carried him back up to the house.

JAD: Later that night a group of Mau Mau crept out of the forest, lured Roger and Esme Ruck out of the house, killed them. And then the whole gang, including that same servant that had helped the boy, they march into the house, go up to the little boy's room, and they hack him to death.

CAROLINE ELKINS: And there's a very famous photo of the young boy's bed. Absolutely bloodied, which is in every major newspaper.

JAD: And almost overnight, Mau Mau becomes synonymous with pure evil.

TAZIM NASSER: In our mind, in children's mind, Mau Mau were bigger than life, darkest dark people that you ever saw. Men, men, men.

JAD: And actually as we were reporting this story, one of our reporters, Latif Nasser, told us about how his mom grew up next door to Kenya in what is now called Tanzania. And to her and her friends, the Mau Mau were like ...

TAZIM NASSER: Like a monster to children.

JAD: ... the bogeyman.

TAZIM NASSER: That was sort of a threat, all the time. Our mothers especially would refer to, "If you don't drink your milk or if you don't sleep, Mau Mau will get you. The Mau Mau will come and get you."

LATIF NASSER: And how scared were you?

TAZIM NASSER: You know what? Just the word Mau Mau would make us run, crawl under the bed.

ROBERT: I'm old enough to be one of the people who thought there were communists.

CAROLINE ELKINS: That were going to come get you in the middle of the night.

ROBERT: Yes, they were like ISIS or some weird, sort of self-organizing terrorist group.

CAROLINE ELKINS: Yes, the most bestial, horrible, awful, savage movement that had ever hit the face of the British Empire.

JAD: Okay, so here's where we get to the part of the story that is in deep flux. After the murder of the Ruck family, the settlers demanded that the colonial government do something. And they did. They pursued the Mau Mau fighters, it's supposedly small band of fighters, into the forest. There were skirmishes that lasted for years. Story goes, the Mau Mau movement never quite gained traction, and ultimately the British quelled the rebellion. They handled it.

JAD: Now as for how they handled it, for the longest times people would look back, it was this giant blank spot. No one quite knew what happened. And here's why: According to David Anderson, by the time the British finally decide to leave Kenya—this is 1963 ...

DAVID ANDERSON: By that time, Kenya is around the 20th different colony that Britain will leave. So it's about halfway down the list. So there's already in place a process.

[NEWS CLIP: At the Uhuru Stadium, the articles of independence were handed by the Duke to the country's prime minister.]

JAD: There's a formal exchange of powers. They set off fireworks and then ...

[NEWS CLIP: At midnight, the Union Jack was lowered for the last time.]

JAD: ... the Brits roll out.

DAVID ANDERSON: In other words, they run a smooth and colorful and happy exit.

JAD: And at some point in that well-worn exit process, either right before the exit or right afterwards, there was, as David calls it ...

DAVID ANDERSON: The weeding of documents.

KATIE ENGELHART: I mean, the British government conducted very, very sophisticated purge operations in all of its former colonies.

JAD: That's Katie Englehart again. She says, everywhere you look—Uganda, Palestine, Rhodesia, Zanzibar, Nigeria, Jordan, Malaya, Hong Kong ...

KATIE ENGELHART: There are stories of papers being kind of tightly packed into boxes and dropped at sea. A lot of papers were burned.

DAVID ANDERSON: There's a joke among Indian historians that on the day that India achieved its independence, when the celebrations were taking place in Delhi, you could hardly see what was going on on the podium because the waft of smoke blowing across from the bonfires of burning documents.

JAD: All of which is to say, that it was assumed for 30 years that that blank spot of the Mau Mau emergency would just stay blank and the story of the evil Mau Mau would just continue, because there were no documents to say otherwise. But then we get to Caroline Elkins.

ROBERT: How did you—like, once upon a time you were a curious, young grad student or something? Not ...

CAROLINE ELKINS: Yeah, more or less. In fact, we even have to go back further. I'm dating myself at age 45, but I have to go back to my undergraduate years. Talking 1990. And I was at Princeton, and you do senior theses there. And Princeton was ahead of its time. And I got lots of funding and I went off to London and Kenya.

ROBERT: How old are you when you're taking this trip?

CAROLINE ELKINS: Oh, I'm 20.

ROBERT: So Caroline is working in Nairobi ...

CAROLINE ELKINS: And I'm doing research. At the time, my senior thesis was looking at the Kikuyu, which is the largest ethnic group in Kenya. And I was looking primarily at the shifting roles of women and the ways in which they were impacted by colonialism.

ROBERT: So Caroline would wake up every morning and would walk to this old colonial building, right in the middle of Nairobi city center.

CAROLINE ELKINS: Called the National Archives. It's loud, it's dusty. You know, sometimes you had to jump under the desk for several hours because there was a shootout across the street.

ROBERT: You're kidding! Really?

CAROLINE ELKINS: Yeah. That was quite a Saturday. Long story short ...

ROBERT: So one day, she was at the archives flipping through some files when ...

CAROLINE ELKINS: I came across some files on a detention camp. Kamiti detention camp.

JAD: Is it Kamiti? Kamiti you say?

CAROLINE ELKINS: Kamiti. K-A-M, as in Mary, I-T-I.

JAD: And this was in Nairobi?

CAROLINE ELKINS: Just outside Nairobi. And I said, "Gosh, you know, I know nothing about this."

ROBERT: So she calls over the archivist.

CAROLINE ELKINS: Guy named Evanson. And I said, "Evanson, you've got anything else like this?" He said, "Yeah, let me take a look." And then Evanson starts bringing me some other files, also related to Kamiti. Very bureaucratic files.

ROBERT: These pages were filled with details, numbers of prisoners. A lot of them were women.

CAROLINE ELKINS: Well over a thousand. Because they would mention a hundred of this, and a couple hundred of that. And at that point, I thought, what's going on? So ...

JAD: A short time later she gets back to Princeton.

CAROLINE ELKINS: And being the good little undergraduate history major that I was, I searched high and low about detention camps in Kenya.

JAD: Nothing much.

CAROLINE ELKINS: Yeah.

ROBERT: No mention of this center anywhere?

CAROLINE ELKINS: There's nobody who had done a systematic study of it. And, that's what I was after.

JAD: So without anything else to go on, Caroline just started driving upcountry, as they say.

CAROLINE ELKINS: In the middle of nowhere Kenya.

JAD: All these tiny little villages in the Central Province.

CAROLINE ELKINS: Really, if you wanted to find middle of nowhere on the map, I was in it. I would just show up at somebody's little shamba or farm one day and next thing you know, I'm conducting an interview.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Caroline Elkins: Can you ask her while working about how many people?]

JAD: These are tapes she recorded on a few of her trips. She would speak to people through her research assistant, Terri Wyremu.

CAROLINE ELKINS: Some of these interviews would go on for hours. Then one interview begets the next. Every time you finish an interview, you say "Do you have somebody else I could talk to?" And they say, "Oh yeah, I've got my friend who lives three ridges up and four hills over."

JAD: So she would talk to that person. And then the person they referred to. And then the person they referred to. And this was what she did for, like, five years.

CAROLINE ELKINS: I went and interviewed several hundred villagers.

ROBERT: And what exactly are they telling you?

CAROLINE ELKINS: Stories you can't imagine.

JAD: What those stories were, and what those stories have begun to unravel, is up next.

[LISTENER: Hi, this is Darlene calling from Kampala, Uganda. Radiolab is supported in part by the National Science Foundation and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, enhancing public understanding of science and technology in the modern world. More information about Sloan at www.sloan.org.]

JAD: Hey, I'm Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT: And I'm Robert Krulwich.

JAD: This is Radiolab. Before we get to the stories that Caroline was referring to, we should say that as we were sort of reporting this story, we really kind of fell in deep. To the point where Jamie York, who had already gone to London to get hassled by those guards at Hanslope Park, he then decided to spend part of his vacation in Kenya, basically following in Caroline Elkins's footsteps. And that's when he stumbled into something kind of surprising.

JAMIE: So I got picked up early one morning in Nairobi, and driven about three hours into the countryside. And after what felt like five right turns, 37 lefts, we finally wind up in this completely rural place. It really does feel like the middle of nowhere.

JAD: With like a little village or something?

JAMIE: Yup, a little cluster of houses and rolling hills in a county called Nyeri. Got my stuff, got out of the car. Followed Terri, who had arranged the trip.

TERRI: My name is Terri Wyremu. I am 41 years old.

JAMIE: This is the same Terri who translated for Caroline Elkins many years ago. Anyhow, passed a few kids. And Terri walks me into this little clay hut. There's a table in the center of the room. There's a handful of plastic chairs around it. And eventually, people start showing up.

JAMIE: I'm good, how are you?

JAMIE: Women. Nine women, who are all in their late 80s, early 90s. Make introductions, and honestly, I'm a little bit disappointed, because the Mau Mau I thought were just men, fighters. And seeing these women, I thought, oh no. I realized most of the men have died of old age.

JAD: Oh, so you thought you weren't going to meet anybody?

JAMIE: Exactly. But I thought, okay, I'll just ask.

JAMIE: How many of the women, like show of hands ...

JAMIE: How many of you identified as Mau Mau? Instantaneously, everyone put their hand up.

JAD: All nine people?

JAMIE: Yeah. And then started to sort of chuckle.

TERRI:They find it funny that we're asking them, because it's obvious they were supporting Mau Mau.

JAMIE: They were like, of course we were supporting the Mau Mau. We were the Mau Mau. Like that was everybody.

JAD: Oh, interesting. So it wasn't just like a small band of militants.

JAMIE: There wasn't a small band of militants. Amongst the Kikuyu, it was almost everyone.

JAD: This is one of the first things that caught Caroline Elkins's attention. Made her really question that official narrative. Because when she was doing interviews 15 years ago, she says everyone she spoke to ...

CAROLINE ELKINS: Everyone to a person, and we're talking hundreds of interviews, started with I took the oath on such and such a date. Very interesting.

JAD: Seemed to her what you had here was not a small insurrection. This was a mass movement. And she would discover that the British response to it was also massive. 1953, shortly after the murder of the Ruck family, the white settlers marched, demanded that the colonial government do something. And so what happened is that the colonial soldiers ...

TERRI: They came to the village.

JAD: They started going to villages across Kenya.

CAROLINE ELKINS: They rounded everybody up.

JAD: Slaughtered their cattle, slaughtered their goats.

CAROLINE ELKINS: Burned down their homesteads.

JAD: And put them into these prison villages.

CAROLINE ELKINS: Some 800 barbed wire villages throughout Central Province Kenya.

TERRI: The village was like a concentration camp.

DAVID ANDERSON: The thing to grasp here is that this is very carefully designed and very practical.

JAD: David says that there was a very carefully planned system at work. The barbed wire villages were primarily for women and children. Men were usually sent to these detention camps which were basically prisons. The logic of those camps was actually thought up by a group of British academics who met in 1953, sort of an emergency meeting to discuss the "Mau Mau problem." And they decided at that meeting that clearly, the real reason the Mau Mau are rebelling ...

DAVID ANDERSON: Is that they were captured by some kind of mental illness.

JAD: It had nothing to do with the fact that their land had been taken away from them. No, it was that they were temporarily crazy and the committee decided it must have something to do with those oaths.

DAVID ANDERSON: Oaths were seen by the British as a primitive way of capturing a Kikuyu mind. And making the person unreasonable and insensible. The only way, they argued, you could get rid of the oath was to convert the person back to sanity. Part of that involved a confession of what they'd done. Once confessions were made, they would then be rewarded by a better prison regime. They'd be moved into another compound, given privileges, given better food. You moved along the system. They called a pipeline. You moved along the pipeline until you were released.

JAD: But you first had to confess.

GITU WA KAHENGERI: To confess.

JAD: This is Gitu Wa Kahengeri.

GITU WA KAHENGERI: Freedom fighter. I joined the Mau Mau freedom struggle when I was 17 years of age.

JAD: He quickly became an organizer, recruiter, and therefore a target.

GITU WA KAHENGERI: They had to search for me. And they caught me. They put me into a detention camp. They want us to say loudly that we forsake the Mau Mau struggle. But we refused. We refused.

JAD: In fact, one man told us the story of how in one of the barbed wire villages, every once in a while ...

TERRI: The Mau Mau would come to the edge of the forest.

JAD: Just outside the village's fence. These were the fighters who hadn't been captured yet. They'd come right to the edge of the camp where a lot of the children would be playing.

TERRI: And because no grownup would suspect children of understanding anything about what was happening in that country, the people in the village used to use the children to take messages to the people, the fighters in the forest.

JAD: That's how they passed food and information to the fighters. And in a way kept things going. That point is, according to David, that inside the camps you had ...

DAVID ANDERSON: Massive resistance.

JAD: And so in many cases the British colonial soldiers would double down. Warning, the following is pretty graphic. There's a BBC documentary called "White Terror" that has tons of these frighteningly common stories of abuse from detainees.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: He told me how naked, tied by his feet to the bars, he was brutally beaten on the testicle with a stick.]

JAD: One of them is a man giving a tour of the prison cell he was kept in.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Then they seared his eyes with hot coals. They kept him there for eight days.]

JAD: There's another story of these three men who were made to strip naked.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: One of the men was made to put his head into a bucket of water. Then the white officer held one of the prisoner's legs aloft, while a guard held the other. And another guard brought some sand, which they started to push into the detainee's anus with a stick. They kept on doing this, alternatively putting in sand and water, all the while pushing the mixture in with the stick. That act still gives me nightmares to this day. Because that was something that should never be done to a human being.]

JAD: And that period ...

DAVID ANDERSON: Of coercive violence ...

JAD: ... it lasted throughout the 1950s.

DAVID ANDERSON: Now the Mau Mau were bad guys.

CAROLINE ELKINS: Listen, there's nothing to excuse this kind of terrorism.

DAVID ANDERSON: But, the Kenyan campaign was a sledge hammer used to crack a nut.

ROBERT: There have been a lot of different estimates to try and pin down the scale of the British campaign. They range from 160,000 people killed, maimed, tortured, detained, to much, much higher numbers. Caroline Elkins did her own calculations, and according to her ...

CAROLINE ELKINS: By the time it was done, nearly the entire Kikuyu population of a million and a half people were detained, tortured, murdered, systematized force labor. And you have to look at scale and if you weigh the balance sheet of this, is how many Europeans died. 32.

JAD: Huh.

ROBERT: Like, why isn't this a tail that everybody in the world knows. In the event, say, of the enslavement of the Hebrew people under the Pharaoh, they were slaves in Egypt. The Pharaoh wouldn't let them out. Moses had to cross the—it becomes the national story of the Hebrew people. In this situation, you have General Kenyatta, I believe is a Kikuyu, becoming the first president. Why wouldn't he make this the national story?

CAROLINE ELKINS: Well, Kenyatta comes out of detention, and one of the first things he does is he denounces Mau Mau as being hooligans. This same organization that accelerated independence in Kenya.

JAD: She says the same movement that scared the British scared him. He didn't want them suddenly organizing and taking his power.

CAROLINE ELKINS: So for decades, from 1948 until 2002, the ban on Mau Mau that had been put in place by the British colonial government remained in place.

JAD: Meaning it was illegal to even talk about it. But eventually in 2005, Caroline publishes her book, "Imperial Reckoning" which included the hundreds of interviews and painted a picture of just this systemic violence. The book was well received, but she says that a lot of critics told her, nice story but ...

CAROLINE ELKINS: No. This is an act of fiction.

ROBERT: An act of fiction?

CAROLINE ELKINS: I made it up.

ROBERT: But you had all these interviews.

CAROLINE ELKINS: Right. But one of the lines of critique was that it's all based upon oral testimony. Oral testimonies aren't usable. There's no story here.

JAD: She says a lot of that was just blatant racism.

CAROLINE ELKINS: You know, Africans make up stories.

JAD: But buried in there is sort of a legitimate concern. I mean, memory is faulty. We know that oral histories are notoriously unreliable. If you're going to rewrite an entire history, you need to get beyond personal anecdote. You need ...

DAVID ANDERSON: Documents that illustrate and prove it beyond doubt.

JAD: And as we mentioned, beyond those few that she found, the documents didn't seem to exist. Nonetheless, fast forward. 2009.

CAROLINE ELKINS: That book ...

JAD: Caroline's "Imperial Reckoning."

CAROLINE ELKINS: ... became the basis of a very large lawsuit.

[NEWS CLIP: These Kenyan independence veterans ...]

JAD: In June of 2009, five Mau Mau veterans representing over 5,000 Mau Mau flew to London.]

[NEWS CLIP: The seat of an empire they say is responsible for torturing them.]

JAD: And filed a lawsuit against the British government.

CAROLINE ELKINS: The first time the British government had ever been sued by a former colonized population.

[NEWS CLIP: The Mau Mau veterans want an apology and some form of recompense for what happened.]

JAD: Are you at all nervous going into the court?

MARTYN DAY: I think the word 'nervous' is not the word I would have used. I told my partners to write off the case. I was not at all convinced that we were going to go anywhere but down.

JAD: That's Martyn Day. He represented the Mau Mau veterans in court. And the reason he was so sure that the case was going to go down in flames was, well, same issue.

MARTYN DAY: You just didn't have the documents.

JAD: All they had were stories that weren't exactly rock solid.

MARTYN DAY: It was a nightmare. Old Kenyans in their late 70s and 80s. First of all, most Africans in my experience find dates extremely difficult. But people in their 70s and 80s are almost impossible?

JAD: And this was actually a huge problem, because in the British system if you're going to bring forward an old case, like one that's more than six years old ...

MARTYN DAY: The key question to the judge is: can you still get a fair trial?

JAD: And the government could plausibly argue no, too much time has passed.

MARTYN DAY: We really worried that the judge would say, well look, there can't be a fair trial because actually these witnesses are so old, so up and down just in terms of their memories, that really their evidence isn't worth a great deal.

JAD: So to recap ...

MARTYN DAY: I wasn't really optimistic.

JAD: But then in kind of a last ditch effort, he contacted historian David Anderson.

DAVID ANDERSON: To act as an expert witness.

JAD: Because David had written a book about African history that was chocked full of legal documents.

DAVID ANDERSON: And they approached me to ask whether there was material in the legal cases I dealt with that might be useful to them.

JAD: And that's when he told him something that would ultimately lead all of us back to that scary building of secrets. He told them for the past 20 years he has had this hunch.

DAVID ANDERSON: Well, long before the Mau Mau trial came to court, I and a number of other historians believed that documents had been brought back from Kenya to Britain.

JAD: David says that in that same Nairobi archive where Caroline Elkins had found the document about detention and thought ...

CAROLINE ELKINS: Gosh, you know, what's going on?

JAD: ... in that same place, somebody else had found another document that had also fallen through the cracks. And this one was a simple packing slip.

DAVID ANDERSON: Listing of documents for transportation. All of their packing up and removal.

JAD: Now as for where those documents were moved to, no one knew.

DAVID ANDERSON: No.

JAD: Maybe to an incinerator or bottom of the ocean.

DAVID ANDERSON: But from 1997, '98, '99 ...

JAD: Like a starving man with a single Pringle, David kept on.

DAVID ANDERSON: And I eventually got documents from the National Archives in Britain that confirmed ...

JAD: The stuff from Kenya actually landed in an airport in Britain.

DAVID ANDERSON: On the eve of independence. I then was able to find out who took them, which van they went in. I even got the car's registration number. But ...

JAD: That's when the trail went cold. They filed document request after document request.

DAVID ANDERSON: And we get nowhere.

JAD: Then something totally unexpected happens.

DAVID ANDERSON: Two historians working on Southern Africa actually got access to Hanslope Park.

JAD: They got inside. One of them was a former colonial administrator, so he could work some connections to get his way in. Anyhow, afterwards, he sends David Anderson a text message.

DAVID ANDERSON: Telling me that in Hanslope Park he'd seen miles and miles of shelving of documents from other colonies, including Kenya.

ROBERT: Was that a figure of speech miles or was that literal?

DAVID ANDERSON: I think he meant it literally.

ROBERT: Really?

DAVID ANDERSON: He's seen a vast hangar, as he described it, with row upon row upon row of documents.

JAD: So when Martyn Day, the lawyer, contacted David Anderson and asked him, "Can you help us with our case?" David said, "Here's what I can do. I can't actually give you any documents because I don't have any, but I can outline the documents that I think might be out there."

DAVID ANDERSON: The documents I believed the British government were hiding away.

JAD: So he wrote a witness report for the judge, summarizing everything he knew.

DAVID ANDERSON: Giving all the details I had. I didn't mention Hanslope Park. I didn't say where I thought they were. I just said I knew they'd come into Britain, and I wanted to know what happened.

JAD: The judge read that report and then basically asked the government, do you have them or not?

DAVID ANDERSON: "Look, if you can't answer this question, you'll be held in contempt of court." In other words, I will interpret this as you withholding information. And that basically means you lose the case. That decision was the turning point.

[NEWS CLIP: Half a century on from Britain's withdrawal from Kenya, documents detailing the alleged brutality employed by the British colonial authorities have finally been released.]

DAVID ANDERSON: And suddenly, having spent years denying these documents existed, within four days they found them.

[NEWS CLIP: Kenyans were waiting in Nairobi today for the news from London.]

[NEWS CLIP: Well, you can see the reaction of these people here. They've won an important battle here today.]

KATIE ENGELHART: I mean, we're talking something like 300 boxes of files. Tons of missing documents. 15,000 papers relevant to the case.

ROBERT: This again is Katie Engelhart of Vice News. She reported on the trial and the extensive number of files that the government produced.

KATIE ENGELHART: 100 linear feet, I think those files held. And they contained really, really damning evidence of Britain's conduct in Kenya.

ROBERT: The files made it clear that the central government in London did know what was happening in Kenya. There was specific documentation of rounding up of Mau Mau fighters. There was even a memo about a Kenyan being roasted alive.

KATIE ENGELHART: And there was this pleading letter written by detainees that had been smuggled out of a camp. And it, hurry, hurry, hurry, in order to save our souls. Absolutely damning evidence.

ROBERT: The government ultimately agreed to pay about £20 million to the people who brought this lawsuit, which works out to roughly $4,600 each.

JAD: Here's what I don't understand. Why would they even save those documents?

DAVID ANDERSON: Well, looking through the collections that have now emerged, it's quite clear to me that they wanted to save documents that showed that not all the European staff in Kenya had been happy about compulsive force.

KATIE ENGELHART: There's a letter written in 1953 by the colony's attorney general. He observed that detention facilities in Kenya were, "Distressingly reminiscent of conditions in Nazi Germany or Communist Russia."

JAD: Oh, so you think that people—some of the British officers in Kenya saved the files precisely because they were damning?

DAVID ANDERSON: Yes, they saved stuff that would demonstrate that we didn't like this.

JAD: Whatever the reason, here's why the Mau Mau case has become so much bigger than just the Mau Mau case. As soon as journalists and historians learned about the existence of those files, they started to relentlessly poke and request more documents. And soon, those 1500 ...

KATIE ENGELHART: Very soon, that became 8,800 files. And then 20,000 files. And then 1.2 million files. And at the time, the estimate was that the files occupied about 15 miles of floor-to-ceiling shelving.

ROBERT: What?

KATIE ENGELHART: 15 miles.

DAVID ANDERSON: The process that has been invoked by the Mau Mau case is going to have even wider repercussions than people yet realize.

JAD: We got a little—just a little waft of that when we were talking with a woman named Mandy Banton.

MANDY BANTON: Senior research fellow at London University.

JAD: She used to work at the National Archives in London. And we called her just to help us parse all this stuff. And at one point I asked her, is this just a Kenya thing? And she said ...

MANDY BANTON: Oh no, no, no, it's not. By any means.

JAD: And then she explained that after the Mau Mau case, the Foreign Commonwealth office, which is the technical name for the place that was holding those documents ...

MANDY BANTON: Almost immediately afterwards, it admitted that it actually had documents from 37 former colonies.

JAD: Whoa!

MANDY BANTON: Yes, exactly.

ROBERT: You mean that there could be dirty stuff from Malaysia, dirty stuff from Palestine, dirty stuff from ...

MANDY BANTON: Cyprus, you know, the obvious sort of trouble spots, if you like.

JAD: I mean, this is like a rewriting of history, essentially is what could happen?

MANDY BANTON: Well, it is a rewriting of history. And I mean, there are now quite a lot of people looking at these comparatively newly released records.

JAD: Now both David and Katie cautioned us that the new stuff, when it comes out, might not be quite as revelatory as all those Mau Mau files.

KATIE ENGELHART: Well, I think there are nuggets. And I think—I think historians will find them.

JAD: For David Anderson, one of those nuggets might be the documents about the Cold War.

DAVID ANDERSON: Those could be historically really very, very important.

JAD: For Caroline Elkins ...

CAROLINE ELKINS: Israel and Palestine, and Malaya and Singapore.

KATIE ENGELHART: And I want to know what's in those Hong Kong files.

JAD: There's over 250,000 documents on Hong Kong, just Hong Kong. Which sort of brings us to the situation that we're in now.

DAVID ANDERSON: Just the most ridiculous, ridiculous, stupid situation imaginable.

JAD: Which is that, for the moment, the British government's policy ...

DAVID ANDERSON: Is that all documents must be reviewed and redacted before release.

KATIE ENGELHART: So, each file needs to be looked over by what's called a Senior Sensitivity Reviewer. Although colloquially it's just weeders. It's basically retired senior diplomats. So if you can imagine, you've got 15 miles of papers and you've got literally a couple of dozen retired diplomats.

DAVID ANDERSON: And they sit in an office literally turning pages, trying to stay awake.

JAD: Sitting here I just imagine like take a little sip of tea, and redact. All day long. Sip, redact. Sip, redact.

KATIE ENGELHART: And at the rate that we're going ...

JAD: By the time these files finally see the light of day ...

KATIE ENGELHART: It will not be within my lifetime. It could literally be hundreds of years.

JAMIE: I keep thinking about these two groups of elderly folks.

JAD: Again, producer Jamie York.

JAMIE: The litigants in the Mau Mau case are in their 80s and 90s. It just strikes me that what a crazy, lucky break for them that in the very final years they're alive that they've survived to hear this apology from the British government and acknowledgement of the story they've been telling for 50 years.

DAVID ANDERSON: Well, I ...

JAMIE: I suspect others won't be so lucky?

MARTYN DAY: Thank you for putting it that way, because I am having got to know the plaintiffs in the case when they came to London, it was very clear to me that what mattered to these people was not a financial settlement, at all. But rather, acknowledgment. Just simple acknowledgment that these things had been done to them. So, on the day that the barrister for the crown stood up in court, and to all of our astonishment said quite simply, the British government admits the tortures. Once I gathered my wits and looked round behind me in the court, two of the plaintiffs were in tears. And it brought home to me what a traumatic, appalling experience this had been for them. From start to finish. So yes, I agree, for them to get that triumph was remarkable. Remarkable.

ROBERT: But, says our producer Jamie York, it was really remarkable only for some people.

JAMIE: So when I went to Kenya and I was talking to these people who had lived through the emergency, I wanted to know about what they thought of the settlement. And a lot of them were like, what settlement?

TERRI: They heard rumors about the government of Britain having agreeing to apologies.

JAMIE: Some of them had heard about it. Some of them hadn't. But it doesn't really matter to them, because the people who got paid, that's just a tiny sliver of the vast majority of people who suffered. What this one guy told me is that what he and most people, what they want, need, isn't so much an acknowledgment, it's to get back what was taken from them.

TERRI: Pieces of land, a place where one can keep some goats or cows.

JAMIE: So that he can do what any 80, 90 year old wants to do, leave something behind.

TERRI: To give their children and blood children a better life.

ROBERT: Special thanks to Matthias Schwartz for first bringing us this story, and to Martin Lavengina and to Faith Alube of the Kenyan Human Right Commission.

JAD: Yakin Youhakenda for the use of their music. And Sruthi Pinnamaneni for production support. This story was produced by Matthew Kielty. Original music from Matthew Kielty. A hell of a lot of travel and reporting support from Jamie York. I'm Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT: I'm Robert Krulwich.

JAD: Thanks for listening.

MOLLY WEBSTER: Coming up next, we shift gears slightly. We're gonna look at public records like newspapers and daily content, and we're gonna consider the ways that that starts to become a historical record, and what happens when those types of archives start to be edited or even rewritten.

[LISTENER: Hi, this is Tamara from Pasadena, California. Leadership support for Radiolab science programming is provided by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Science Sandbox, a Simons Foundation initiative and the John Templeton Foundation. Foundational support for Radiolab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.]

MOLLY: Hey, I'm Molly Webster, senior correspondent here at Radiolab. And so far today, we brought you a story about these dusty documents that have the power to rewrite the history of colonialism in Kenya. Or maybe better said, to give us a more precise, accurate reading of that history.

MOLLY: So in the previous segment, the documents were private government records hidden away in a highly-secure government building. But that is not the only type of historical record there is. Some of our historical records are entirely public. You know, newspapers, flyers, advertisements. And we started wondering, like, what about public records like that? And so I want to play for you a bit of a conversation that I had with this historian, Jane Kamensky. I was talking to her about this movement that's happening in Europe and America in recent years, where there are legal cases about redacting people's names or sometimes even events from public records like newspapers. It's something called the right to be forgotten. The idea being, how long should your past haunt you, right? So maybe there comes a point in time where we delete someone's name so they can move on with their lives from this thing that they did at one point. So that's what you need to know to understand the conversation. And without further ado, I give you Jane Kamensky.

JANE KAMENSKY: I'm a professor of history at Harvard, and the faculty director of Radcliffe's Schlesinger Library on the history of Women in America.

MOLLY: I am not a historian, so I'm just really curious as to how historians use news—I guess archives?

JANE KAMENSKY: The archives of newspapers, large and small, far and near, have been a fundamental part of historical research from the days that people used to go to archives and sit and look at clippings files, at physical clippings files. Many of the great collections of early British and early American newspapers come through one and another kind of hoarding because paper was so valuable that people tended to use it up. You know, you read the news, you shared the news with your friends, you used it to line your basket and wrap—and then you used it to wrap your fish, and then it was done.

MOLLY: Hmm.

JANE KAMENSKY: So, you know, occasionally we got these caches of people who had filled an entire attic with newspapers. A huge breakthrough was made in the middle of the 20th century with the invention of various microreproduction technologies, and then microfilm and then microfiche technologies, and then digitizers stepped in and mostly scanned those already micro-reproduced assets. They didn't go back to the original pages.

JANE KAMENSKY: So scholars have been using that newspaper record to search across tens, hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands of titles. It not only surfaces new answers, but it surfaces new questions. And I guess the thing that most concerns me about the deliberate unpublishing or disappearing of news that exists and was published and was factual is that we don't know what the questions are, that—what either the questions or the methods will be that a scholar in the future will apply to that record.

JANE KAMENSKY: So I'll give you one example of a source that's been extraordinarily fruitful that I think nobody publishing it at the time or really storing it until 200 years later would have thought twice about, which are advertisements for enslaved runaways. These were incredibly proliferant notices in early newspapers. A scholar at CUNY Graduate Center, David Waldstreicher, has done work to demonstrate, in fact, the money made from runaway notices kept a lot of newspapers in business between colonial times and the American Civil War.

MOLLY: And so typically, this would be like a white person thinking they owned a Black person, and then they ran away and saying, like, bring this person back.

JANE KAMENSKY: Bring this person back. This reward offered. And these advertisements are incredibly detailed and intimate, because the person who's posting the ad wants the maximal chance of recovering their human property, and the way they're gonna do that is by identifying them in detail. So they will often tell the reader things about what their enslaved man or bondswoman or child looked like, what they sounded like, where they came from, the way that they may have affected a disguise, that they may have covered their scars and dressed and is passing as a free man because they can read and write.

JANE KAMENSKY: We have learned naming patterns. You know, the person that I call Prince, or, you know, these names, Prince or Cato, these sort of classicizing names that mocked the degradation of slavery, but is now calling himself Freeman. You know, so ironically, the way scholars have read these announcements, especially in the last 15 or 20 years as they've been available on databases, is to recover the humanity of enslaved people. You know, here were these cosmopolitan people who acquired a tatteredemalion of clothing and skills, and had multiple languages and multiple potential contacts, especially in port cities, and followed the conduits of slavery into freedom in ways that we would not have known but for the ability to read those advertisements en masse.

JANE KAMENSKY: I think we recover through them the incredible intimacy of slavery, which a lot of our stories of the institution lost until quite recently, right? That there was a master class and a bound class. And yet when you see owners describing their property, where they know every tooth and scar and intonation and look—the down look is one of the things that often pops up in these ads. And the lengths that people went to free themselves. One of the most recent sort of powerhouse books that has used this methodology was tracking the advertisements that George Washington placed in pursuit of the people who ran away from his plantation.

MOLLY: Hmm. So, like, the idea here being that one, in that moment of that day, no one would have thought, "Oh, 200 years from now, I bet you scholars are gonna be using this advertisement to piece together our relationship with each other." And then the other thing to think about is if that record somehow disappeared.

JANE KAMENSKY: Exactly.

MOLLY: Or if a name in it disappeared.

JANE KAMENSKY: And you could imagine the people at whose behest the record was created. I mean, I'm just spinning a scenario here.

MOLLY: Yeah. Go for it.

JANE KAMENSKY: But, you know, while slavery has vanished in my state, I don't want to be associated with this practice anymore now that our moral compass has shifted. This advertisement is carrying my name as an owner, and I need it to be erased. So there's an instance where a lot of intimate records about slavery were either not created or were destroyed, right? People can burn their letters, but the fact that there is a record in a newspaper that is stable gives us a chance to see something that would otherwise have eluded us.

JANE KAMENSKY: I would say that a lot of the questions we have about especially local newspapers now, a lot of the things that scholars are looking to local newspapers for now, are places where we can find the voices of the marginal, the less accomplished, the less powerful, the people who might be described in a Rotary organization or a high school sports team or something that is low to the ground, but who might not, because of, you know, their sort of privileged location or the lack of it, have gone on to do something where we can track them by their, you know, their well-published novel.

MOLLY: Yeah, I guess you're pointing at something which is, you know, like, what could you do? Like, what could you do? Or I guess on the flip side would be, what could you lose if you deleted, like, you know, Tom Smith from Seville, Ohio? Like, you know, it seems so small if you lose his name. It just seems so insignificant at some level.

JANE KAMENSKY: I guess, you know, what you lose is the ability to ever have a robust answer to that question. The story has disappeared. We can never ask a question. We can never ask a good question. We can never ask a bad question. We can just never ask a question at all. And I think ultimately—you know, ultimately, it's not the scholar at Harvard that loses. It's Seville, Ohio that loses by not making visible the fullness of we the people.

MOLLY: All right, that was Jane Kamensky, historian and scholar at Harvard University. If you want to hear more about the idea of the right to be forgotten and redacting information from newspapers, you should head over to Radiolab.org and listen to an entire hour we did on it called the Right to Be Forgotten. And as always, even if you don't make it there, thank you for listening today.

[LISTENER: Hey, this is Michael. I'm calling from Culver City, California. Radiolab is produced by Jad Abumrad. Our staff includes Brenna Pharell, Ellen Horne, David Gebel, Dylan Keefe, Matt Kielty, Andy Mills, Latif Nasser, Kelsey Padgett, Arianne Wack, Molly Webster, Soren Wheeler and Jamie York. With help from Damiano Marchetti, Molly Jacobson, and Alexandra Leigh Young. Our fact checkers are Eva Dasher and Michelle Harris.]

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