Peter Harold Richard Poole was a British-born Kenyan engineer and shop owner.

Peter Poole was one of hundreds of young British men who moved to Kenya to suppress the Mau Mau Uprising. According to Robert Ruark, these men would hunt Africans with the "same enthusiasm that they devoted to polo or football", often killing them for "sheer sport", British Kenya, 1960

Peter Harold Richard Poole was a British-born Kenyan engineer and shop owner. Poole had emigrated to Kenya from Essex in 1953, after which he immediately joined the Kenyan police reserves to help suppress the Mau Mau Uprising. He later joined the military, and served in Germany, before returning to Kenya in 1956. He owned an electrical shop on Nairobi's Government Road (now Moi Avenue). He was married with two children. According to Robert C. Ruark, an American author, columnist, and big game hunter, he knew exactly why Poole went to Kenya.

Kenya has always had a reputation for what the British call "bad hats" , unprincipled free booters, unruly younger sons, and to characters of various shadings.

"We call Poole's type 'Kenya cowboys,' and I have seen them by the hundreds. They were generally too young to have experienced war, and the excitement of the Mau Mau was a welcome hatch for brawny, high-spirited young men to escape the boredom of hard work on the family farm by dashing off into the bush to chase "Wogs" with the same enthusiasm that they devoted surely to polo and football

 But one way or another they got almost happily accustomed to killing, justly in some cases, callously in others, and, in many instances, for sheer sport. The nature of the Mau Mau and its practices were not such as to encourage either tenderness or discrimination. Peter Poole was one of the many who considered that if a man was black he was a n***** if he was a n***** he was likely to be guilty of something, and it was easier to shoot him than argue with him.

On October 12, 1959, Poole was charged with killing Kamawe Musunge, his black houseboy, in Gordon Road, Nairobi. Musunge had been riding a bicycle when Poole's two dogs stopped him. Musunge threw stones at one dog, for which Poole shot him dead with a Luger pistol. The case took two trials. The first jury had to be dismissed after one juror stood up and declared that he had a conscientious objection to any guilty verdict. But of course, that's not why Ruark was writing about Poole. Poole was a nobody until December 10, 1959, the day of the verdict at his second trial.

"You have been convicted of murder and the law provides for only one penalty — that you be hanged by the neck until you die."

It seems that today was just not Poole's lucky day.

Even decades before the uprising, there were many like Peter Poole.

From the veranda of the famed Norfolk Hotel, then as now a watering hole for the country's elite, settlers took potshots at an African crowd assembled on March 16, 1922, to protest the arrest of an early nationalist leader.

Harry Thuku's own account of the day, having seen events unfold from his cell, relates that as the police fired from the front, other European settlers who had gathered at the Norfolk Hotel began shooting into the crowd from behind. Other accounts substantiated Thuku's claim; settlers were drinking on the veranda of the hotel near the scene and joined in the shooting and were responsible for many of the deaths.

Those shootings killed at least 21 people and injured 28 more.

You can read about the atrocities committed by the British and their collaborators during the Mau Mau Uprising. From the looks of it, men like Peter Poole were responsible for many of those atrocities. That said, I am not going to talk about the concentration camps, the torture of detainees, or even the massacres, as horrific as they were.

There is something peculiarly chilling about the way colonial officials behaved, most notoriously but not only in Kenya, within a decade of the liberation of the [Nazi] concentration camps and the return of thousands of emaciated British prisoners of war from the Pacific. One courageous judge in Nairobi explicitly drew the parallel: Kenya's Belsen, he called one camp.

In June 1957, Eric Griffith-Jones, the attorney general of the British administration in Kenya, wrote to the Governor, Sir Evelyn Baring, detailing the way the regime of abuse at the colony's detention camps was being subtly altered. He said that the mistreatment of the detainees is "distressingly reminiscent of conditions in Nazi Germany."

Despite this, he said that in order for abuse to remain legal, Mau Mau suspects must be beaten mainly on their upper body, "vulnerable parts of the body should not be struck, particularly the spleen, liver or kidneys", and it was important that "those who administer violence ... should remain collected, balanced and dispassionate".

"If we are going to sin", he wrote, "we must sin quietly."

Yup, his suggestion was simply to ease down the cruelty several notches.

So instead, I will focus on the executions:

I'm not surprised by what Stalin or Churchill said. I am surprised by what Roosevelt said, even though he was joking. Now, I know that man did some awful things, but honestly, I don't think we will ever have another President based enough to say something like that. That's why this is only about what Churchill said. Between 1940 and 1949, the British executed roughly 210 Nazis between 1940 and 1949. That number includes spies, collaborators, and fanatical German POWs who murdered fellow POWs in camps in England.

Now, as much as I hate to say it, the Mau Mau Uprising included war crimes on "both sides". Obviously, the war crimes committed by the British were 1000 times worse and I don't blame the Mau Maus for brutalizing Africans who were collaborating with the British. In fact, many of these collaborators had committed atrocities themselves. That said, even Kenyan historian Bethwell Allan Ogot said there were some truly unnecessary excesses.

"Mau Mau fighters, ... contrary to African customs and values, assaulted old people, women and children. The horrors they practiced included the following: decapitation and general mutilation of civilians, torture before murder, bodies bound up in sacks and dropped in wells, burning the victims alive, gouging out of eyes, splitting open the stomachs of pregnant women. No war can justify such gruesome actions. In man's inhumanity to man, there is no race distinction. The Africans were practicing it on themselves. There was no reason and no restraint on both sides."

But of course, I'm not talking about the Mau Mau's excesses. I'm talking about what the British did, and the number of Mau Mau rebels who were hanged during the uprising. In light of what Ogot said, I could understand if they hanged, I dunno, one hundred rebels over the course of the 8 years that the rebellion lasted. However, that's not what happened.

The British possibly killed more than 20,000 Mau Mau militants, but in some ways more notable is the smaller number of Mau Mau suspects dealt with by capital punishment: by the end of the Emergency, the total was 1,090. At no other time or place in the British Empire was capital punishment dispensed so aggressively—the total is more than double the number executed by the French in Algeria.

Another 400 were sentenced to death but reprieved because they were under 18 or women. The British declared some areas prohibited zones where anyone could be shot. It was common for Kikuyu to be shot because they "failed to halt when challenged."

The leader of the Mau Mau uprising, Dedan Kimathi, wasn't hanged for murder. He was hanged for possessing a firearm. According to Ndirangu Mau, one of the African collaborators who helped capture Kimathi, even that charge wasn't legitimate.

Kimathi was charged in Nyeri with being in possession of a firearm, a .38 Webley Scott revolver, even though Ndirangu never narrated finding one on him when he captured Kimathi.

On a side note, Ndirangu is very lucky that the British won. The Harkis, who collaborated with the French in Algeria, weren't so lucky. And yes, they also committed war crimes against their fellow Africans. That's why they were so desperate to run away to France. You can imagine what Charles de Gaulle said of those people next. Well, actually, you don't have to imagine.

In April that year the president was quoted as telling the cabinet that the “harki” locals were a “rag-tag who served absolutely no purpose and of whom we must rid ourselves as soon as possible,” and he was later recorded as exclaiming, “French – those people? With their turbans and djellabas!”

Maybe then, did those Harkis finally realize why their countrymen hated the French so much. After everything they did for him, they weren't honorary French people in de Gaulle's eyes. They weren't even "good" brown people. Nope, they were still just cannon fodder.

It is estimated that the National Liberation Front (FLN) or lynch mobs in Algeria killed at least 30,000 and possibly as many as 150,000 Harkis and their dependents, sometimes in circumstances of extreme cruelty. In A Savage War Of Peace, Alistair Horne wrote: "Hundreds died when put to work clearing the minefields along the Morice Line, or were shot out of hand. Others were tortured atrociously; army veterans were made to dig their own tombs, then swallow their decorations before being killed; they were burned alive, or castrated, or dragged behind trucks, or cut to pieces and their flesh fed to dogs. Many were put to death with their entire families, including young children."