In Kenya home guards were rewarded, in Algeria they were humiliated

A security guard keeping vigil as women queue in a Mau Mau detention camp. [File, Standard]

These times appear momentous and call to mind past ‘revolutionary’ times.

They included the 1950s when colonial subjects attacked European territorial colonial order in Asia and Africa. In Africa, two of such ‘revolutions’ were in Kenya against the British and in Algeria against the French.