‘For the first time ever, British ministers were forced to issue a public confession admitting that atrocities were carried out ‘at the hands of the colonial administration’.

The admission came via a Whitehall lawyer addressing three elderly Kenyans who had gone to the High Court in London to demand damages and an apology. Now in their 80s, one of them told the court how he had been brutally castrated in a British detention camp during the Mau Mau rebellion - Britain’s bloodiest colonial war.’