Archive sheds light on dark British past

London, UK - For historians, it represents a treasure trove of boundless rewards and an opportunity to revisit some of the most enduring myths about Britain's colonial past.

But for some of those still living with the physical and psychological scars, the release of thousands of previously secret government-held documents offers fresh hope of finally gaining a measure of justice for their suffering under British rule.

Last month, a judge in London's high court ruled that three elderly Kenyans could sue the UK government for torture they endured at the hands of the colonial authorities during the 1950s Mau Mau uprising.

The government conceded that the trio, Paulo Muoka Nzili, 85, Wambugu Wa Nyingi, 84, and Jane Muthoni Mara, 73, had suffered brutal abuse, including castration, sexual assault and beatings as a result of their detentions during one of the bloodiest and most enduring rebellions of the British empire's final days. But it argued that the distance from the events over which it was accused meant a fair trial was impossible.

That argument came unstuck when the foreign office was forced last year to reveal the existence of almost 9,000 hidden files brought to Britain from 37 former colonies. The files had been concealed as a consequence of a government policy that any "embarrassing" documents should not be left in the hands of the territories' successor governments.

Among them were several thousand papers relating to the British authorities' handling of the Mau Mau crisis, including details of how senior officials had colluded in the mistreatment of detainees by changing the law to provide legal cover for what they deemed "acceptable punishment", even knowing that what they were condoning equated to torture by international standards.

"If we are going to sin, then we must sin quietly," wrote Eric Griffiths-Joyce, the Kenyan attorney general, in a memo to Sir Evelyn Baring, the colonial governor, in 1957.

Seeking justice

David Anderson, the historian whose painstaking paper trail tracing the documents' transfer from Nairobi finally led to their re-discovery at the government's Hanslope Park archive, said that their contents had been "absolutely critical" to the success of the Kenyans' legal case.

"Although we had a very good general idea of what had gone on in Kenya, we didn't have some of the detail that you would need to make a legal argument," he told Al Jazeera. "But these documents show they discussed it. We now know who was in the room at the time, we know what was said, so we have it, as it were, chapter and verse."

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Archive sheds light on dark British past