Editors – Mick WilsonJane Tynan

It all started with a conversation on torture techniques the British colonial administration employed in Kenya in the 1950s to suppress the Mau Mau uprising. We were struck by the extent of suffering that Kenyan people had to endure under British occupation, but even more astonished by the occupying forces’ efforts to hide evidence upon their retreat from this East African country. The British colonial venture in Kenya started in 1920, and subsequent restrictions on land ownership and local agricultural practices gave rise to a popular movement for land justice by members of the Kikayu tribe; without financial backing from outside Kenya, Mau Mau insurgents launched a violent campaign armed with homemade weapons. As Caroline Elkins argues, draconian measures to suppress Mau Mau transformed the colonial enterprise from “simple white supremacy, to one that was overtly eliminationist”.^[1] Elkins found memoranda from late colonial Kenya filled with descriptions of local people as “vermin”, “animals” and “bestial”, designations that seemingly normalised the creation of vast detention camps.^[2] Suspects were rounded up and held in these “screening” centres where they were subjected to electric shocks, whipping, burning, shooting and mutilation, purportedly to “gather intelligence”. While we exchanged thoughts on state brutality in Kenya in the 1950s, the 2021 PARSE conference agenda on the matter of violence emerged, and it seemed a useful framework within which to elaborate our basic interest in state violence as practice; how it is planned, trained for, augmented, strategised and systematically deployed through various bureaucratic, technocratic and socio-technical frameworks.