Welcome to Harold

Smith's Libertas Homepage

Libertas is dedicated to issues of freedom of information and in particular to treason by the British in Nigeria at the time of Independence and up to the present day.

Contents

!! N E W ! Letters to Prime Minister Gordon Brown; President Barack Obama; USA Ambassador in London ! N E W !

!! N E W ! Article in ‘New African’. February 2009 ! N E W !

!! Letter to Mr Dominic Grieve, MP. Conservative Shadow Justice Minister

1) War; 2) Plea for British Honour; 3) Biographical Information; 4) Contact Information

Autobiography – “A Squalid End to Empire: British Retreat from Africa”

I witnessed this. The truth was concealed from the British people. I thought one family should hold true to Britain’s proclaimed values and hopefully reveal all to the peoples of Africa, the victims of so much cruelty and injustice inflicted by totally dishonest and criminal British political leaders.

My story is being told in Africa. It is free and now has a life of its own, thanks to some great African journalists, and particularly Baffour Ankomah.

We have had a rough old ride since 1956 when I refused orders and took a stand for civilised values in Africa. This is the tale of one British family’s odyssey.

! ! Magazine/Newspaper Articles

! ! Essays

Last Revised: 8 February 2009

! Renewed since April 2008

! ! New since 29 January 2009

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Letter of 27 January 2009 to Prime Minister Gordon Brown

Ref: Reply of 17 November 2008 from Mr Davies of The Direct Communications Unit

to my letter of 9 November addressed to William Hague, MP

Dear Mr Brown,

A Fresh Start in Africa

President Obama will have read with great interest two recent books on Kenya which reveal British evil in the 1950’s. He will also know of my recent, well-documented ‘New African’ articles about the destruction of democracy in Nigeria in the same decade by the then British Government.

The CIA has fully documented records of the truth of these evil events, to which I am drawing President Obama’s attention. You, of course, know these British secrets well, as my many letters to you record.

President Obama is making history with a fresh start for the USA. Would it not be great if, as a gesture of goodwill to President Obama, you decided to follow his policy of transparency and honesty, and apologised for the twin evils of what our Government did in Kenya and Nigeria in the 1950’s. A return to transparency regarding those two former colonies at the end of Empire will strengthen our special relationship with President Obama and enable Whitehall to compensate my family.

I go back to 1943 when I joined the Labour Party, and it was in 1949 that I was presented to Mr Attlee as a leader of Labour Youth in the North West.

Yours sincerely,

(Signed) Harold Smith

(Copy letter sent to President Barack Obama)

Letter of 27 January 2009 to President Barack Obama

Dear President Obama.

A Fresh Start in Africa

I am inviting Prime Minister Gordon Brown to come clean on British evil in Kenya and Nigeria in the 1950’s. I am sure you would welcome this. I will keep you informed on his response.

The secret British state has, without due process, punished me for fifty years with virtual house arrest, surveillance and harassment. I should like Mr Brown to come clean on that too, and make proper redress.

Yours sincerely,

(Signed) Harold Smith

(Copy letter sent to Rt. Hon Gordon Brown, MP, Prime Minister)

Letter of 27 January 2009 to the US Ambassador in London

Your Excellency,

Will you please forward the enclosed letter with attachments to President Obama.

I owe a debt of gratitude to the CIA, for they sought to protect my life in 1960. My password was ‘Donovan’. An acknowledgement would be appreciated. My website above tells my story.

Yours sincerely,

(Signed) Harold Smith

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The Immoral Imperative

Article from ‘New African’. Issue of February 2009. Pages 72-74

The British tortured Obama’s grandfather

Today, the British go abroad to preach human rights to other nations.
But not too long ago, they were torturing freedom fighters all over their colonies in Africa,
including President Barack Obama’s Kenyan grandfather.

Cameron Duodu reports.

In the October issue of New African, my article, “How The Black Struggle Is Interconnected”, recounted how, in October 1945, many black politicians from Africa, the Americas and the Caribbean, met in Manchester, England, to discuss the course of the struggle to free Africa from colonial rule. I specifically highlighted the role played in the conference by the Kenyan politician, Jomo Kenyatta, and what effect the meeting with so many black activists had on him. When he returned to Kenya from Britain, he contributed immensely to the freedom movement in that country which the British derisively called the “Mau Mau” revolt.

I linked the Kenya freedom movement directly to the fact that Barack Obama’s father left his country to go and study in the United States, where he met Barack’s mother. I wrote:

“In a very literal sense [then]... Obama is the product of the Black Struggle around the world. Looking at him now [I continued], it may be difficult for the ordinary person to link him to the city of Manchester and the conference held there in 1945 that was to have such a revolutionary effect on the future of Africa and significantly, on Kenya, the land that gave birth to Obama’s father.”

Since I wrote that article, information has come to light showing that Obama’s links to the Kenyan freedom struggle are even more rock-solid than I had imagined. Both Obama’s father and his grandfather were jailed by the British during Kenya’s independence struggle! In an article entitled “Beatings and abuse made Barack Obama’s grandfather loathe the British” and subtitled “The [American] President-elect’s relatives have told how the family was a victim of the Mau Mau revolt”, published on 3 December 2008, The Times [of London] revealed that Obama’s grandfather was imprisoned by the British on the mere suspicion that he was giving information to the Mau Mau revolutionaries. To try and force him to disavow his protestations of innocence, they tortured him whilst he was in prison.

The amazing aspect of the affair is that Obama’s grandfather was a Luo, and not a Kikuyu, the ethnic group that spearheaded the Kenyan freedom struggle. The British line has all along been that the Mau Mau freedom fighters were Kikuyu tribalists who wanted to drive away both whites and other Kenyan tribes — including the Luo - from Kikuyu lands.

To achieve their purpose, the British alleged in their propaganda that the Kikuyu resorted to atavistic “oath-swearing” ceremonies during which they swore to kill everyone who was not a Kikuyu. But The Times has unearthed evidence that shows that this was a deliberate piece of disinformation, disseminated to win the other ethnic groups to the British side and turn them into the enemies of the Kikuyu. In other words, “divide and rule!” What’s new?

Barack Obama’s grandfather was called Hussein Onyango Obama, and fought in Burma as a conscripted British soldier in World War II. (It will be recalled that Jomo Kenyatta himself escaped similar conscription by the skin of his teeth - he removed himself just in time from the town in which he was practising carpentry to another town, where he became a shop assistant, in the employ of an Asian businessman.)

On being discharged from the army, Onyango Obama managed to find work as a cook for a British military officer serving with the British army contingent based in Kenya. But inexplicably, he was arrested in 1949 - long before the Mau Mau emergency was declared by the British in 1952.

During two years’ detention in a high-security prison, he was subjected, according to his family, to horrific tortures to extract information from him about what he knew about the growing unrest in Kenya. The unrest, of course, was caused by the seizure of African lands, which were distributed to white settler farmers who were disdainfully called the kaburi by the dispossessed Africans.

Interviewed by The Times, Obama’s grandmother (whom Obama calls “Granny Sarah”) said: “The African warders were instructed by the white soldiers to whip my husband every morning and evening till he confessed.” That they kept him in jail for two solid years indicates that he did not crack under torture. He probably did not have anything to reveal anywav, but the British didn’t care.

Mrs Sarah Onyango, who is now 87, said white soldiers visited the prison every two or three days to carry out “disciplinary action” on the inmates suspected of “subversive activities’.

Her husband later told her upon his release from prison that the white soldiers “would sometimes squeeze his testicles with parallel metallic rods. They also pierced his nails and buttocks with a sharp pin, with his hands and legs tied together, his head facing down.”

Obama refers briefly to his grandfather’s imprisonment in his best-selling memoir, Dreams from My Father, but states that his grandfather was “found innocent”.

Grandpa Onyango Obama served the British Army well in Burma during World War II and, like many army veterans, his hope, on returning to Africa was that Africans, having helped the British defeat the Germans and the Japanese, would be given greater freedoms from colonial rule.

Instead, the British seized their lands. So although Grandpa Onyango was a Luo from western Kenya, he sympathised with the Kikuyu Central Association, the organisation leading an independence movement and whose secretary was Jomo Kenyatta.

“He did nor like the way the British soldiers and colonialists were treating Africans, especially members of the Kikuyu Central Association,” Mrs Onyango said.

But the records of Grandpa Onyango’s trial and imprisonment do not survive because “all such documentation was routinely destroyed in British colonies after six years”.

The British responded to the Kenyan rebellion with unimaginable brutality: at least 12,000 freedom fighters were “officially” listed as having been killed, most of them Kikuyu. But Kenyans believe that the overall death toll was more than 50,000. Yet although British propaganda claimed that the Mao Mau wanted to kill all Europeans, “in total, just 32 European settlers were killed”, acknowledges The Times.

Mrs Onyango believes that her husband was denounced to the British authorities by his own white employer, who sacked him on suspicion of consorting with “troublemakers”. She recalls the day of her husband’s arrest. He was picked up by two soldiers, and taken to Kamiti prison, the national maximum-security prison outside Nairobi. “This was like a death camp because some detainees died [there] while being tortured,” Mrs Onyango remembers. “We were not allowed to see him, nor even [to bring] him food.” She said her husband was told that he would be killed or maimed if he refused to reveal what he knew of the insurgency, and was beaten repeatedly until he promised “never to rejoin any groups opposed to the white man’s rule.”

Mrs Onyango said some of her husbands fellow inmates were beaten to death with clubs.

During Obama’s first visit to Kenya in 1988, his grandmother vividly described to him the growing resentment against white colonial rule in Kenya - with rallies and mounting violence - that were to explode into full-scale rebellion in 1952. Most of this activity centred on Kikuyu land, she told him, But the Luo, too, were oppressed - they were turned into the main source of forced labour for the British.

“Men in our area began to join the Kikuyu in demonstrations. . . many men were detained, some never to be seen again,” she told her grandson.

At the height of the rebellion, an estimated 71,000 Kenyans were held in prison camps. The vast majority were never convicted. According to the Harvard historian, Caroline Elkins, who won a Pulitzer Prize for her exposé of British atrocities during the Mau Mao uprising, there were reports of sexual violence (homosexual rapes) and mutilation using “castration pliers” inside the prison camps. “This was an instrument devised to crush the men’s testicles,” Elkins writes in Britain’s Gulag.’ The Brutal End of Empire in Kenya (published in 2005). “Other detainees also described castration pliers, along with other methods of beating and mutilating men’s testicles.”

Several hundred letters from camp inmates survive in the Kenyan National Archives, “chronicling camp conditions, forced labour, torture, starvation and murder”, according to Elkins.

One white policeman, Duncan McPherson, told Barbara Castle, the former Labour cabinet minister, that conditions in some Kenyan detention camps were “worse, far worse, than anything I experienced in my four and a half years as a prisoner of the Japanese”.

Grandpa Onyango, who was only 56 when he was arrested, came out of prison prematurely aged and deeply embittered. In his memoir, Obama described his grandfather’s shocking physical state: “When he returned to Alego. he was very thin and dirty. He had difficulty walking, and his head was full of lice.” For some time, he was too traumatised to speak about his experiences. “From that day on, I saw that he was now an old man,” Mrs Onyango said.

Barack’s father was also arrested, for attending a meeting in Nairobi of the Kenya African National Union (Kanu), the organisation spearheading the independence movement. Mrs Onyango told Obama that his father, unlike her husband, had been held only for a short time in the white man’s prison: “Because he was not a leader in Kanu, Barack [Snr] was released after a few days.”

In 1960, Barack Obama Snr travelled on a scholarship to the University of Hawaii, as part of a programme sponsored by the late American President, JohnF. Kennedy. Mrs Onyango said that the combative spirit shown by her husband during Kenya’s bloody independence struggle had passed down through the generations to the future president. “This family lineage has all along been made up of fighters,” she said. “Senator Barack Obama is fighting using his brain, like his father, while his grandfather fought physically with the white man.”

NEW AFRICAN February 2009

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Letter of 2 February 2009 to Mr Dominic Grieve, MP, Shadow Justice Minister

Dear Mr Grieve,

Conservatives and the Immoral Imperative

As you know, I want British politicians to distance themselves from the excesses that scarred Africa at the end of Empire in the 1950’s. Denial is no longer an option with a black President of the USA whose origins are in Kenya.

British behaviour in Nigeria and Kenya was morally indefensible. Accepting responsibility, even five decades later, is both an historical necessity and a moral imperative. We need to understand how a civilised, liberal democracy like Britain could treat subject peoples in such a despicable manner. Until this true history is confronted the moral legacy of these horrors will be totally negative. Continued denial will corrupt young politicians and justify them in similar immoral machinations such as the Iraq War.

There are honest mistakes by Governments, but also occasions when Governments seem determined to go on doing the wrong thing, even though the policy is criminal and even downright evil. When there is extensive planning, total secrecy and then an extensive cover-up for half a century, the criminality is clearly calculated and deliberate.

Opposition Parties can co-operate or collaborate in secrecy, through the Privy Council, in covert dirty work abroad, but the Government in power is supposed to accept full responsibility. Successor Governments may collaborate in cover-ups and share guilty knowledge.

In Nigeria and Kenya, Conservative Governments were in power and there was widespread contempt for colonial peoples. As a Conservative Shadow Minister for Justice, who is perhaps in denial on these chapters of colonial history, it is reasonable for explanations to be sought from you.

I enclose a statement by Professor Ronald Hyams, an official government historian, which underlines the importance of the Kenya evil in the history of the Empire. In considering ‘the moral end of Empire, moral imperatives have not only been set aside, but trampled on. We do not have transparency, but a criminal fog – the triumph of immoral imperatives!

If Britain values its relationship with the USA, it needs to come clean on atrocities in Africa now. It is time for today‘s politicians to join me in condemning shameful episodes of Britain’s colonial history. Were these episodes of gross criminality justified by political necessity? What was the mindset and the thought processes of those in Whitehall who ordered these foul machinations? Are today’s leaders cast in the same mould? Are you, Mr Grieve? The almost totally negative response to my appeals to Magdalen politicians, men of stature and supposed moral character, is disturbing.

It is fairly obvious that, only if a civilisation examines itself frankly and accepts the truth, can it draw the right lessons and advance in the right way thereafter. This may be a cliché, but it is no less true for that. As Professor Grayling, to whom I am indebted, states in his classic study of British bombing of German cities, ‘We owe it to our future to get matters straight about the past.’ If we do not accept as moral crimes, British evil acts in Africa, we are at risk of repeating the same mistakes. (“Among the Dead Cities: the History and Moral Legacy of the WWII Bombing of Civilians in Germany and Japan”. A C Grayling. Walker & Company, New York. 2006.)

It is a fact that British machinations in Africa at the end of Empire were in total violation of the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights. This is why Britain needs to apologise and offer redress to the victims of its criminal policies. Britain was in violation of the general moral standards recognised by Western civilisation for many years. Britain was very wrong to behave in this way.

Should colonial officials have refused to carry out these evil acts? Yes, absolutely. A few British officials rebelled and were punished severely. They need redress too. The majority betrayed their trust and retired, in the case of Nigeria, with very generous pensions and kept their mouths shut. In Kenya, because of the brutal murder of British settlers, the British regime allowed themselves to join the same moral depths as the perpetrators of those crimes.

In 1960 the US State Department shielded me when the British Government decided to shut me up and kill me. I will express my gratitude to President Obama.

You may feel, Mr Grieve, that it is honourable to protect the reputation of Tory statesmen like Harold Macmillan (as Gordon Brown might wish to protect the honour of Harold Wilson.) The price you will pay is for his awful mistakes to be repeated again and again.

I am reaching out, beyond the embracing of sad truths, to reconciliation and celebrating whatever that is positive and good that can be found. We could be allies on this journey.

Yours sincerely,

(Signed) Harold Smith

Enclosure:

Hola Camp, Kenya: 3rd March 1959

… Eleven Africans were killed … as a result of beatings. About twenty others were seriously injured at Hola Camp in the same incident. If one had to choose a single fateful date which signalled the moral end of the British empire in Africa, it would thus be 3^rd March 1959.

Ronald Hyam’s Introduction xlv

‘The Conservative Government and the end of Empire 1957-1964.’

Part 1. British documents on the end of Empire, Series A Volume 4.

The Stationery Office. 2000

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(1) War

The History of Britain is the History of War. Britain is always at war somewhere. At half time it wages war on its own people. Mr Blair is at war with his Party - as were Kinnock, Wilson and Gaitskell. This site is an in-depth study of a secret, dirty war on Nigerian nationalists, which caused the deaths of three million innocent, Commonwealth citizens.

This was the biggest of the many, dirty, bloody British wars since 1945. Both the Conservative and Labour and Liberal leadership cliques work together to plan and operate and cover up all this mayhem with total press, media, and establishment co-operation.

The Iraq war is nothing new. Just another chapter in regime change abroad, a.k.a. British Foreign Policy for centuries. Total cynicism? No, but we can see it from Widbrook, England.

 * Address: Turnpike House, Widbrook, Bradford-on-Avon, Wiltshire, BA15 1UD, UK

* Phone Number: 01225 862 725

! * E-mail: hsmith@libertas.demon.co.uk

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 (2) Plea for British Honour

Information is sought by former British Government senior civil servant Harold Smith (Nigeria 1955-1960) regarding British treason, including the rigging of Nigeria's Independence Elections, circa 1960.

British officials served with great honour and distinction in Nigeria. This African giant was governed superbly by a small number of dedicated public servants, who often made personal sacrifices in the course of their duties under very trying conditions. (Harold Smith was struck down by a rare tropical disease in 1960). This fine and truly splendid record of service by British officials was sullied at Independence by Whitehall treachery, which destroyed the careful nurturing of democracy in Nigeria and blighted Nigeria's future. The potentially great African democracy was doomed by these squalid machinations to a future of military coups, assassinations and the horrendous Biafran Civil War, which cost, says the UN, three million lives.

Sadly, many old Nigeria hands, whose great contributions were largely ignored by historians, have died. Others have recoiled in horror from Nigeria's ghastly history since 1960. Yet it needs to be proclaimed that British officials need feel no shame for their nation building prior to the tragically flawed Independence. The historical record of British achievements prior to Independence has been blighted by subsequent events. We need to assess objectively what went wrong at Independence (largely as a consequence of treasonable political interference from Westminster) in order that the sterling contribution of British officials may be recorded for posterity.

Permission to publish this material was sought and granted by the Cabinet Office and D-Notice Committee, subject to an agreement that no Secret Service officials should be named. May I request correspondents to respect my obligation in this matter and to kindly withhold such personal details. Cabinet Office letters of March/April 1993, reference A093/927/1152/1281, and Ministry of Defence letter DM/1712/DPBC of 13 January 1993 refer.

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(3) Biographical Information

HAROLD SMITH (Born 29 April 1927): Ruskin College, Oxford 1950-52. Sir Ernest Cassell Scholarship. Diploma in Social and Public Administration (1952). As part of course trained as social worker in London's East End. Before going to Ruskin was an electrical fitter in Manchester and active trades unionist. Vice Chairman South Manchester AEU; served on Trades Council and Executives of Manchester City Labour Party and Fabian Society. Stood for City Council at age of 22. While at Ruskin chaired Cole Group and was delegate to Oxford Trades Council from Labour Club. Magdalen College 1952-54 on State Scholarship and read PPE.

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(4) Contact Information

hsmith@libertas.demon.co.uk

www.libertas.demon.co.uk

Tel: 01225 862 725

Turnpike House, Widbrook, Bradford-on-Avon, Wiltshire, BA15 1UD

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