A letter to the Times which was published on 12th April 2011.

Professor G S Solt (letter, April 9th) draws a parallel between the Nazis’ treatment of Jews in Austria, which he experienced in the 1930s, and British government policy in Kenya towards the Africans in the 1940s and 1950s.

When Allied troops entered Austria as liberators in May 1945 there were estimated to be barely 10,000 Jews left of the 200,000 at the time of the Anschluss with Germany in 1938.

British policy towards Kenya was set out in the White Paper of 1923.  This stated that “where the interests of the African conflict with those of the European settlers” those of the Africans were “paramount”.  This and similar declarations caused consternation among the settlers, resulting in several protest marches on Government House in Nairobi.

As custodians of the African interests as well as the Asian and European settlers, it was also Britain’s responsibility to maintain law and order.  The Mau Mau insurrection, overwhelmingly recruited from the Kikuyu tribe, was a serious disruption to life and limb causing Europeans to go in fear of their lives over several years and costing the lives of many thousands of those other tribes as well as Kikuyu themselves.

Successive Kenyan governments have shown little disposition to rake over the coals of the Mau Mau emergency, but to move on to build a viable future for all their nearly 40 million people.  Britain and its courts should do the same.

A letter to the Times which was published on 11th April 2008.

Daniel Emlyn-Jones’s absurdly unbalanced description of our colonial rule as a “history of humiliation, exploitation and degradation of native peoples” as in some way explaining the chaos in Zimbabwe (letters, April 8th) can be refuted by literally millions of documented actions to the contrary.

The 1922 White Paper on the colonies, for instance, set the tone for all the remaining colonial territories by roundly declaring in respect of Kenya, where there was substantial European immigration, that the interests of the native population were “paramount”.

To describe Robert Mugabe (born 1923) as “our monster” is likewise absurd.  Mugabe was educated in a Catholic mission school in what was then Southern Rhodesia, which enjoyed complete internal self-government over which the Colonial Office had no control whatsoever.

If anything created the monster in Mugabe it was his proclaimed belief in Marxism, which really is responsible for untold misery, death and degradation all over the world.