Princess Elizabeth was traveling through what was then the British colony of Kenya when her father, King George VI, died unexpectedly in February 1952.

She soon succeeded him as Britain's head of state.

Elizabeth II recently celebrated her seventieth anniversary on the throne.

And Kenya has been independent for nearly six decades.

But the end of British rule there still casts its shadow today.

An immensely brutal war of decolonization broke out shortly after Elisabeth had to cut short her journey to rush to her father's deathbed in London.

The British colonial administration acted with massive severity against the Mau Mau revolt, which was mainly supported by the Kikuyu people.

95 Europeans killed, 32 of them civilians, faced more than 20,000 dead Africans.

During the war, which lasted more than seven years, more than a thousand locals were hanged under hastily passed anti-terror laws, far more than in any other colonial conflict.

Around seventy thousand local people have been held without trial in jails and detention camps, often for years, where the government subjected them to rigorous "re-education" programs.

Well over a hundred thousand people were “relocated”: British-ruled Kenya was a brutal police state in the 1950s.

The first official apology

In her Pulitzer Prize-winning study “Imperial Reckoning.

The Untold Story of Britain's Gulag in Kenya”, the historian Caroline Elkins, who teaches at Harvard, vividly described the British regime of violence and above all the camp system in late-colonial Kenya.

She designed her book, written in an angry tone, as a kind of personal journey of discovery for an initially naïve young scientist who became an uncompromising accuser of colonial excesses of violence.

In this context, Elkins seemed to want to give the impression that she was the first to expose British atrocities in East Africa.

Her book met with a great, albeit divided, response.

While numerous commentators praised her for finally breaking the “vow of silence” that had characterized the discussion of British imperial violence until then, peers in particular criticized her ostentatious gesture of a crusader whose figures were obviously exaggerated – she spoke of around one and a half million Kikuyu who were forcibly resettled – were partly based on sloppy methods and dubious verbal statements.

Elkins loudly banged on open doors.

However, the historian did not give up.

Her book had encouraged some Kikuyu to use a law firm to sue the British government for compensation, and Elkins served as an expert witness in the proceedings that followed.

At the end of this, in June 2013, then-Foreign Secretary William Hague felt compelled to express his regret in the House of Representatives that thousands of Kenyans had been victims of torture and other ill-treatment under British rule in the 1950s.

He also announced that the government would pay reparations to over five thousand Kenyans - the first official apology by a British official to victims of colonial crimes.

Resistance became a forbidden activity

And something else came to light in the course of the court case: before leaving Kenya, the colonial administration had not only burned numerous compromising files on the Mau Mau War, but also taken further material to England and stored it in secret magazines near Northampton .

This process was long denied by the government in London, but could no longer be denied.

For the first time, historians were able to systematically evaluate previously unknown documents that provided evidence of British torture practices in Kenya.