FROM the UN Human Rights Commission to the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee, condemnation has continued to build against the detention without trial of the 490 remaining inmates at Guantanamo Bay. On Thursday Dr John Sentamu, the Archbishop of York, added his voice. He drew parallels between the Bush Administration’s legal tactics and those once deployed by President Idi Amin in Uganda.

Having witnessed at first hand Amin’s perverted interpretation of justice, Dr Sentamu is well placed to make the analogy. But in some respects the anti-terrorist measures of the British Government in 1950s Kenya provide a more telling comparison. Like the fanaticism of militant Islamic fighters, the apparent indifference to death of Kikuyu tribesmen who joined the Mau Mau rebellion in 1952 struck terror into the hearts of white settlers and non-Kikuyu Kenyans alike. In their attack on colonialism and, it seemed, on all forms of modern civilisation, the Mau Mau represented, in Elspeth Huxley’s phrase, “the yell from the swamp”.

Confronted by an enemy that did not play by the rules, the British authorities in Nairobi responded by meeting fire with fire. At the peak of the rebellion around 70,000 Kikuyu tribesmen were detained in camps without trial — a level of incarceration that seems robust in comparison with Guantanamo. What was more, those detained in the camps were, in some respects, the lucky ones. They were the inmates who were not found guilty of terrorist offences. Of the latter, more than a thousand were hanged. Such are the legal niceties in a state of emergency.

What lessons are to be drawn from this episode? The first is that the Mau Mau rebellion was brought to heel. Their war-waging means had not the scope of the modern terror campaign: they claimed the lives of between 12,000 and 20,000 Kenyans, but fewer than a hundred of their primary target — white settlers.

Despite the efforts of Dingle Foot and Barbara Castle to highlight abuse in the camps, many in Britain failed to see what the fuss was about until Enoch Powell spoke out. Enraged that another MP had called the detainees “sub-human” in a Commons debate about the cover-up of deaths at the Hola camp, Powell pointed out that Britain could not hope to leave Africa with a legacy of representative institutions while falling “below our own highest standards” there. Britain, Powell concluded, could not “pick and choose where and in what parts of the world we shall use this or that kind of standard” for ultimately “all government, all influence of man upon man, rests upon opinion”, and how Englishmen were seen to act in Kenya was how they could be judged elsewhere. So, alas, is it with Americans and Guantanamo.

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