This article contains discussions of extreme violence and includes some violent imagery.
Visceral encounters with images of violence, delivered through the small screens we carry, have become almost synonymous with the human condition in the twenty-first century. Before even leaving our beds, we scroll past bombed apartment blocks in Ukraine, children pulled from the rubble in Gaza, and police shootings in the United States. The images appear between photographs of friends, animal videos, and advertisements, curated by algorithms that shape our visual lives. We are often told that this constant exposure has created compassion fatigue: that seeing too much suffering has made us numb.
Yet numbness does not accurately describe our relationship with these images. People are horrified, but they also march, donate, share photographs, and follow wars unfolding in real time. What may exist instead is political helplessness – the feeling of witnessing extraordinary suffering while becoming less certain that witnessing can change anything. If this is the case, then the instinct to look away from another video of violence may not stem from an absence of compassion as much as the diminishing belief that looking can make a difference.
As a historian of colonial violence, I have wondered whether this relationship between seeing and political action has a history. Today’s visual world differs profoundly from that of Britain’s late colonial empire: images are circulated not only by governments and journalists but by humanitarian organisations, activists and those living through violence themselves. The final decades of imperial rule do, however, reveal a longer history of struggles over whose suffering becomes visible and how it should be interpreted. Before smartphones and social media, governments recognised that images were political. The question was not simply whether violence would be seen, but whose violence would become visible and to what end.
Few examples demonstrate this more clearly than the Lari massacre, which took place during the Kenya Emergency of 1952–60. Since the early twentieth century, the Gĩkũyũ communities of Tigoni in central Kenya had faced attempts by the colonial state to remove them from land claimed by European settlers. After years of resistance, many families were resettled at Lari, a process that deepened inequalities and left poorer tenants dispossessed. Some regarded the relocation, negotiated by Chief Luka Wakahangare, as an act of betrayal. Others, however, benefitted greatly from the new settlement.
Similar processes took place across central Kenya. In response, secretive bands of militants known as Mau Mau began to resist resettlement and target communities who were believed to be loyal to the British administration. Afraid of the rising violence, the colonial government declared a state of emergency in October 1952. Over the next eight years, it would suppress the rebellion through military action, mass detention, forced villagisation and the extensive use of capital punishment.
Lari became a divided community, where tensions over land were entangled with competing allegiances. On the night of 26 March 1953, hundreds of Mau Mau insurgents attacked the settlement, burning homes and killing around 120 people, many of them women and children. The victims were not random: many belonged to the families of local chiefs, headmen and soldiers who had aligned themselves with the government.
In the aftermath, the British colonial government transformed the massacre from an episode of violence into a spectacle of atrocity. Journalists were invited to witness the aftermath and relay vivid, lurid descriptions, while graphic photographs of the dead circulated through official propaganda. These images, probably taken by police or security personnel, are harrowing. Among photographs of bodies slashed and burned beyond recognition, one shows an African woman lying face down in the grass, her patterned dress still intact and her child dead beside her. Others depict burned homes reduced to smouldering ruins.
As Susan Sontag observes of atrocity photography, some photographs are intended to shock. In colonial Kenya, this shock became a political strategy. Colonial officials described Lari as ‘the greatest tragedy of Kenya in the Emergency’. Although the most graphic photographs were withheld from British newspapers, copies were distributed to editors and shaped the language of reportage. Reports described women watching their children die, infants pulled from burning homes and families slaughtered.
The colonial government also reproduced selected photographs in propaganda publications produced in Britain and Kenya, with captions describing ‘mothers with babies in arms’ being ‘cut down’. Readers across the empire were encouraged to interpret Lari through the suffering of women and children and through established Western ideas about innocent victimhood and illegitimate warfare. Almost overnight, Lari had become the defining atrocity of the Emergency and the most visceral proof of Mau Mau’s supposed savagery.
These images, however, only tell half the story. While its victims deserve to be remembered, the massacre formed part of a wider cycle of violence. Colonial security forces and loyalist auxiliaries killed more people in the immediate reprisals than had died in the initial massacre. Over subsequent years, thousands of suspected insurgents and civilians were killed, while tens of thousands were detained without trial and subjected to forced labour, coercive interrogation and abuse. The prominence of the Lari photographs therefore raises a more revealing question: what violence did British audiences not see? The colonial state was remarkably willing to publicise violence committed by Mau Mau. It was far more cautious about exposing its own.
This was not because colonial security forces left no photographic record. The National Archives in London contain hundreds of photographs documenting Britain’s counterinsurgency campaign. Some of the most striking were taken less than a year after Lari, following security operations around Kandara in Fort Hall District, one of the principal centres of insurgent activity. They show rows of dead Mau Mau fighters laid out while officials catalogue their bodies. European officers stand nearby. Everything appears ordered, administrative and controlled.
These photographs never entered Britain’s public memory of the Kenya Emergency. Colonial publicity emphasised the supposed benefits of colonial rule and framed the violence of security forces as the restoration of order. They did circulate, however, within psychological warfare campaigns directed at African audiences. Graphic images of dead fighters appeared in leaflets dropped over insurgent-held areas, warning in Gĩkũyũ that ‘Mau Mau cannot win’. The corpses of some insurgents were also displayed outside police stations and administrative posts, allowing local communities to witness the consequences of rebellion.
Images like these were not intended to provoke sympathy or moral outrage. Instead, they sought to demonstrate the reach of colonial power, intimidate insurgents, and reinforce the supposed inevitability of British victory. Where British viewers were encouraged to identify with African victims of Mau Mau violence, African audiences were confronted with the visible consequences of resisting colonial rule. This asymmetry was both deliberate and political.
Seen from this perspective, Lari was never simply evidence of Mau Mau brutality. It became part of a broader visual regime through which the colonial state distinguished between violence that demanded outrage and violence that could be understood as restoring order. The government curated its images of the Emergency carefully, producing ‘atrocity’ through choices about what could and could not be photographed, whose suffering would become visible and whose would remain unseen.
That history complicates our understanding of atrocity imagery today. British responses to the Lari massacre remind us that visibility has never been politically neutral. The question is no longer simply whether violence should be seen, but how different forms of violence continue to be amplified, contextualised or ignored. Algorithms now perform some of the work once undertaken by colonial information offices, privileging certain images over others and ensuring that particular atrocities acquire extraordinary visibility while others receive comparatively little attention. Governments and politicians also continue to regulate and propagate specific images for established political needs, seeking to shape narratives in an age of global conflict.
Today’s visual landscape, however, is also profoundly different. Violence no longer reaches us days or weeks after an event. It appears almost instantly, recorded on mobile phones and uploaded to social media. Unlike the carefully managed visual economy of colonial Kenya, today’s images emerge not only from governments but also from journalists, humanitarian organisations, activists and civilians, often competing to shape how violence is understood. This environment creates new opportunities to challenge state publicity and ensure that no violence goes unseen.
As Sontag warns, repeated exposure to images might dull our moral response, leaving viewers exhausted. Perhaps, however, the greater challenge is political helplessness: the experience of caring deeply while feeling unable to translate witnessing into political change. History may not tell us how to overcome that feeling, but it can teach us to ask different questions of the images that confront us: who made them visible, what remains outside the frame, and whose political purposes those acts of seeing serve. Ultimately, it is only by being attentive to the political forces that shape visibility that we can begin to challenge them.