Review | Emergency Exits exhibition 

Andrew Stone reviews the Imperial War Museum’s ‘Emergency Exits’ exhibition which explores Britain’s violent retreat from empire and the brutality of colonial rule.

I doubt you’ll bump into many flagshaggers at the Imperial War Museum’s ‘Emergency Exits’ Exhibition, but if they do make it in they are in for a rude awakening about the nature of Britain’s brutal imperial past. I did have some initial concerns. Entering the first main room, a guy sitting regally at a desk intoned that ‘I contend that we are the finest race in the world and the more of the world we inhabit the better it is for the human race.’ Behind him hung a portrait of concentration camp pioneer and World War One butcher Lord Kitchener, looking for all the world like General Melchett from Blackadder. However the seated guy was a fellow visitor aiming to ridicule a quote from Cecil Rhodes printed provocatively on the wall, and Kitchener’s picture is undercut by a quote about how ‘the shameless executions [of the Sudanese in 1898] after the victory and the general callousness which he has repeatedly exhibited – have disgusted me’ from that doyen of pacifism Winston Churchill. This overview of the imperial narrative is then supplemented with a display of some self-serving posters about the colonies’ economic contribution to World War Two, before we get to the main focus of the exhibition – the decolonisation of the two decades that followed.

It would be misleading to call this a period of peace. As well as the support Britain gave the US in the Korean War in 1950-3, it was also waging a series of conflicts in colonies that were straining to achieve the freedoms promised by the wartime Atlantic Charter. The exhibition focuses on three key examples – Malaya (now Malaysia), Kenya and Cyprus. As it explains, ‘They were declared ‘Emergencies’ by the colonial authorities: calling them ‘wars’ would invalidate many of the insurance policies of the European settlers. It also allowed new powers to be adopted.’

These new powers attempted (in an extremely disproportionate and cack-handed way) to separate anti-colonial fighters from civilian populations. The latter were to be the target of a so-called ‘hearts and minds’ strategy, by controlling infrastructure, recruiting locally-raised police, and employing ‘divide and rule’ tactics, stoking tensions between different ethnic groups. The former were to be the target of extreme violence.

The British response to the Malayan ‘Emergency’, which began in 1948, was heavily motivated by the Labour government’s desire to maintain control of the lucrative rubber and tin industries. It was justified in Cold War terms, as the insurgents were led by the Communist forces of the Malayan National Liberation Army, but this was just a convenient excuse to impose a counter-insurgency campaign that would forcibly resettle over half a million people into guarded ‘New Villages’ as part of the Briggs Plan. Dyak people were recruited as trackers and both they and British soldiers were encouraged to decapitate and collect the heads of killed MNLA fighters.

A note by the Commissioner General’s office in 1957 laid out four reasons why Malaya was important to the ‘United Kingdom’:

1. As a source of essential raw materials and a very substantial dollar earner;
2. As a country in which many millions of British capital are invested;
3. As a base for defense purposes; and
4. As a symbol of British influence in the area.

Ah, what noble philanthropy!

In Kenya the colonists, who had stolen vast tracts of land, were resisted by Mau Mau, a movement of Kikuyu, Embu and Meru communities that attacked European farms and killed settlers. The British government deployed troops and locally-recruited police, using brutal methods of suppression. Over 80,000 Kenyans were detained without trial in a series of concentration camps, where forced labour and torture were used to ‘rehabilitate’ them.

The Cyprus ‘Emergency’ began in 1955 when the National Organisation of Cypriot Fighters (EOKA) launched an armed campaign to end British rule and (by extension for most of its Greek Cypriot members) achieve Enosis – union with Greece. Co-ordinated attacks on government buildings, military installations and radio stations were met with curfews, intrusive searches and collective punishments. The colonial authorities also increasingly recruited members of the Turkish Cypriot minority to police opposition, which heightened ethnic tensions that broke out in intercommunal violence in 1958. It strengthened the right wing on both sides, emboldening the right wing Greek Cypriot military leader Georgios Grivas at the expense of liberal and socialist forces.

While most targets of the fighters were military, when Catherine Cutliffe, the wife of a British serviceman, was shot dead while shopping in October 1958, British security forces responded by imposing a curfew and detaining around 1000 people ‘as potential witnesses’, and by ransacking and looting local shops. A later investigation recorded 258 Cypriot casualties, including 16 hospitalisations and the deaths of Panayiotis Chrisostomou and Andreas Loukas while in custody.

The exhibition rightly condemns Operation Legacy, the project by which colonial authorities removed or destroyed ‘sensitive’ documents from their archives prior to independence. Thousands of such documents were secretly stored until the government finally admitted to their existence in 2011 and began to declassify them, which has led, eventually, to much greater understanding of the extent of human rights abuses, especially in British repression of the Mau Mau uprising.

The exhibitors note how even after independence was won, each former colony bore the scars of ‘divide and rule’ and (continuing) economic domination. For example, the persistence of British military bases on Cyprus – part of the Independence terms dictated by the Guarantor Powers (Britain, Greece and Turkey). They state that ‘British forces continue to deploy from British bases there, most recently in Middle East conflicts and humanitarian missions’, which is a somewhat coy reference to the use of RAF Akrotiri to run spying missions for Israel over Gaza during its genocidal war.

This concession to diplomatic euphemisms aside, this is a very impressive exhibition that punctures the myth of Britain’s supposed expertise in counter-insurgency, a self-serving piece of propaganda that has been dredged up and reheated every time troops are to be sent out to wage war and dictate the terms of compliance in places such as north of Ireland, Iraq or Afghanistan. 

The layout of the exhibition is effective, with a wooden superstructure containing strips of barbed-wire hinting at the sites of detention common, to some degree, to all three colonies. The voices of the colonised are amplified with oral testimonies and it is evident how historians from Malaysia, Kenya and Cyprus were all part of the curating team. The choice to use three case studies rather than either a generalised overview or a single national account is largely successful – and what is occasionally lost in terms of depth is made up for in interlapping themes. 

The feedback form seemed keen to elicit the understanding that the Imperial War Museum is not, despite its name, a museum that seeks to glorify the empire. It would be difficult to come away from this particular exhibition with that impression.

Emergency Exits: The Fight for Independence in Malaya, Kenya and Cyprus is on at Imperial War Museum London until 29 March 2026.