Of course, the exhibition is not actually called “British Terrorism”. It has the much more neutral name “Emergency Exits: The Fight for Independence in Malaya, Kenya and Cyprus”, which at least has the merit of acknowledging that these were national liberation struggles against an imperialist power in the post-war period.

Nevertheless, it is a very sanitised account of what the British actually did, especially in Kenya where a consensus among European historians is that between 20, 000 and 25 000 Kenyans died, the vast majority at the hands of the British and their local collaborators in addition to 1,090 Mau Mau fighters who were judicially murdered. For all the British propaganda about the cruelty of the Mau Mau resistance movement, only 95 British military personnel and 32 white settlers were killed.

The Kenya Human Rights Commission describes some of the techniques used in their concentration camps by the British who justified their occupation of the country by pointing to their higher level of civilisation:

“Detainees were subjected to arbitrary killings, severe physical assaults and extreme acts of inhuman and degrading treatment.  The acts of torture included castration and sexual assaults which, in many cases, entailed the insertion of broken bottles into the vaginas of female detainees.  Camp guards engaged in regular severe beatings and assaults, often resulting in death.”

The videos of the elderly resistance fighters were powerful, but it would have been enlightening to have seen similar clips of the imperial administrators and torturers in which they attempted to justify what they did. You can appreciate why the British destroyed and locked away so many of their own records about what they did.

Also absent was the British political response to the atrocities. The Tories were in power for the period covered by the three risings and it is unsurprising that they were quietly enthusiastic about campaigns of racist murder, however Labour raised no objection and echoed the imperialist line with a bit of infrequent whimpering about not being quite so nasty. Much as they do with the Gaza genocide. Then as now, it was the left which stood against imperialist barbarism and a Communist Party anti-conscription poster shows that there was some opposition in the British working class.

Frank Kitson, who appears in the series Say Nothing, where he uses some of the techniques he honed in Kenya wrote in his memoirs, Bunch of Five, “Most soldiers [regarded the] finding and disposing [of Mau Mau] in the same way as they would regard the hunting of a dangerous wild animal”.

The Communist led Malayan National Liberation Army, MNLA gave the British occupiers a harder time. They lost 1,443 soldiers and killed about 6700 liberation fighters. What was distinctive about the British army in Malaya is that it encouraged its men and their local collaborators to cut off the heads of the freedom fighters. They also imprisoned about half a million villagers in large concentration camps to cut the liberation movement off from the rural population.

Fighter for fighter, EOKA (Ethnikí Orgánosis Kipriakoú Agónos) gave the British the hardest time of all. The Cypriot organisation which was fighting for union with Greece lost about 110 activists and killed 371 members of the occupation army and their collaborators. Again, torture and judicial murder were part of the imperialist toolkit.

An opening section of the exhibition makes it very explicit that the British saw their colonies as places to be exploited for their natural resources and strategic locations. However, the overall tone is a squeamish liberal distaste for just how beastly the British sometimes were, rather than a confrontation of the fact that this inhuman brutality is the essence of imperialist occupation.

Just to emphasise the point about squeamish liberalism, as you leave there is a touch screen which asks you “How did exploring this part of Britain’s colonial history make you feel?” Option included proud, shocked, sceptical and saddened. “Filled with righteous hatred” wasn’t on there.