On 8 May 1945, and as the French celebrated the Allied victory over Nazi Germany at the end of World War II, tens of thousands of Algerians took to the streets in Setif, Guelma, Kherrata and other cities to peacefully claim Algeria’s independence, as France had promised if they supported it in her fight against Nazism.

The response of the French government at the time was bloody, incredibly brutal, as 45,000 Algerians were massacred. For several weeks, the colonial forces and their militias carried out mass killings, sparing neither children, nor women, nor the elderly. Unarmed people shot at close range, others transported in trucks to be pushed down into ravines, or taken out of cities and executed, before their bodies were burned, then buried in mass graves. Lime kilns were also used by the French army to get rid of the victims' bodies.

‘The horror, the horror.’ Kurtz’s last words in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899) are seared into the memory of those who give serious consideration to European imperialism. In Ian Campbell’s graphic and detailed monograph they find even greater depth when the imperialism was Fascist. By Campbell’s estimate, about 19,000 men, women and children were murdered in Addis Ababa in three days of mayhem from 19-21 February 1937. Some were shot or hanged, others burned to death when their huts were set on fire, and some were beaten to death with clubs, shovels or pitchforks. Yet more were drowned, by being dropped down wells or thrown into the river. The perpetrators were Fascist militia, Fascist-approved immigrant civilians, Libyans and other colonial troops (askari). With some reluctance, ordinary Italian soldiers and carabinieri joined in, too. The occasion for the massacre was the throwing of grenades into a crowd that was being offered alms. It had been addressed by the Italian viceroy, Rodolfo Graziani, who was wounded in the attack and carried, unconscious, to hospital.

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Then, in June 1936, just after Italian armies had entered the Ethiopian capital, Mussolini ordered his viceroy that ‘all rebels taken prisoner to be shot’. Even after Graziani, speaking from his hospital bed, urged the end of hostilities on 21 February, the killing continued in outlying settlements and among prisoners confined in short-term camps, who lacked supplies of food and water. According to Campbell, it was fatal for Ethiopians to reveal formal education or upper-class descent, as was demonstrated not long after, on 21 May, with the assault on the monastery of Debre Libanos. Ethiopia’s Fascist masters aimed to liquidate native intellectuals and any sites or texts that might be deemed to carry a rival history.

When Italian fascists took power in 1922, the colonisers needed to clear Libyan land - by force, if necessary - to be able to settle farmers from Italy. It took Italy over two decades (1911-1932) to fully control the country, which it referred to as La Quarta Sponda d'Italia, or the "Fourth shore of Italy''.

During that era, Italy’s policy of unleashing unmitigated violence to destroy the Libyan resistance and subdue the local population would result in the death of more than 83,000 Libyans. Around 70,000 mostly civilians from the rural areas, including women, children and the elderly, died of starvation and disease.

This deliberate policy of mass killings and organised famine sought to annihilate an entire people and culture. It was followed by a successful campaign against historical memory: a systematic campaign to erase any historical records, as the Italian fascist government suppressed news about the genocide and destroyed material and historical evidence.

The [British] government troops adopted a policy of collective punishment, which was again intended to undermine popular support of the Mau Mau. Under this policy, if a member of a village was found to be a Mau Mau supporter, then the entire village was treated as such. This led to the eviction of many Kikuyu, who were forced to abandon their homes and possessions and sent to areas designated as Kikuyu reserves. A particularly unpleasant element of the eviction policy was the use of concentration camps to process those suspected of Mau Mau involvement. Abuse and torture was commonplace in these camps, as British guards used beatings, sexual abuse and executions to extract information from prisoners and to force them to renounce their allegiance to the anti-colonial cause. The process of mass eviction furthered anger and fear among the Kikuyu who had already suffered through decades of land reallocation, and drove hundreds of squatters to join the Mau Mau fighters in the forest.

The uprising escalated further on March 26, when Mau Mau fighters carried out two major attacks. The first was an assault on the Naivasha police station, which resulted in a humiliating defeat for the police and the release of 173 prisoners, many of them Mau Mau, from an adjacent detention camp.[xiv] The second was the massacre of Kikuyu loyalists at Lari, in which at least 97 Kenyans were killed. The incident was used by the government to further characterise the Mau Mau as brutal savages, and no official mention was made of a similar number of Mau Mau prisoners who were machine gunned to death by government troops in the Aberdare forest.

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By the end of 1954, one million Kikuyu had been driven from their family homes and rehoused in these villages, which were little more than fenced camps and were prone to famine and disease.These heavy-handed and ruthless strategies employed in Nairobi and the countryside were effective in cutting off much of the material and logistical support for the forest fighters.

According to official government figures, the number of Mau Mau killed was 11,503, but there is little doubt that the true number was significantly higher. In comparison, the number of white civilians killed by Mau Mau attacks – the basis of British propaganda denouncing the uprising – was just 32.