Histories of the Hanged: The Dirty War in Kenya and the End of Empire [Hardcover]

David Anderson (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 2005

A groundbreaking work of colonial history in the tradition of King Leopold's Ghost and The Boer War.

A riveting account of Britain's final bloody decade in Kenya, this book tells the story of the brutal war between the colonial government and the insurrectionist Mau Mau between 1952 and 1960. New findings cast the Gikuyu rebels—hardly the terrorists they were thought to be—in a new light and reveal the British to be brutal aggressors in a "dirty war" that involved, among others, Winston Churchill and Harold MacMillan. This astonishing piece of scholarship portrays a teetering colonial empire in its final phase—employing whatever military and propaganda methods were necessary to preserve an order that could no longer hold. 18 photographs, 2 maps.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Anderson's authoritative history of the last days of the British Empire in Kenya focuses on the colonial judicial system, which sent over 1,000 native Kenyans to the gallows between 1952 and 1959, during the state of emergency triggered by the Mau Mau insurrection. At the heart of the tale, along with blustering colonial ineptitude, is white settler ignorance of how its land grabs wreaked havoc on the Kikuyu tribe, Kenya's largest ethnic group and a people viciously targeted by the British, who were intent on rooting out Mau Mau activism at all costs. Anderson, a lecturer in African studies at Oxford, shows how paternalistic land reallocations and relocation of the Kenyan tribes to settlements fostered deep resentment, sewing the seeds of a bloody black-on-black massacre in 1952. Brilliantly analyzing the hierarchies and nuances of Kenyan society, Anderson traces how the Mau Mau hijacked the nationalist Kenya African Union, how the British scapegoated moderate leader Jomo Kenyatta and finally how the British herded virtually the entire Kikuyu population into horrific concentration camps, where thousands perished. Anderson's information-rich history vividly depicts the complex political and social dynamics of the Kenyan nationalist movement as it was confronted by the brutal waning British Empire. This is vital reading for any student of British colonial and African history. B&w photos not seen by PW; maps.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

Anderson's history of the violence in 1950s Kenya overlaps slightly with that depicted in Caroline Elkins' Imperial Reckoning [BKL N 15 04], which covered the detention-and-camp system established by the British colonial administration. In Anderson's effort, the entire Mau-Mau rebellion comes into view, including aspects of warfare and judicial punishment, particularly the application of the death penalty. Anderson's close analysis of capital trials supports his narrative of the origin of the anticolonial Mau-Mau movement, its perpetration of the gruesome murders of white settlers, and the state of emergency and military countermeasures that defeated the insurgency. Anderson weighs the evidence in concluding that these trials were an expedient means of retribution rather than models of legality. They also reflect the fact that it was a civil war within the Kikuyu community, exemplified in the war's "iconographic moment," a ghastly massacre and a subsequent revenge-massacre that convulsed the Kikuyu town of Lari. A dispassionate but disturbing account, Anderson's history will be vital to understanding Kenya's terrible endgame of colonialism. Gilbert Taylor
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 320 pages
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company (January 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0393059863
• ISBN-13: 978-0393059861
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.3 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.5 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #606,227 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #81 in Books > History > Africa > Kenya

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

19 of 20 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars A Lesson Against Brutality January 11, 2009

By Keith Rowley

Format:Paperback

The most striking aspect of this book for me, was that despite the author's appropriately neutral narration, the savagery of Mau MAu still shines like an evil beacon. Anderson makes it perfectly clear that Mau Mau violence was primarily directed against the people of its own Kikuyo tribe, whom it butchered, man woman and child with absolutely no mercy. Infants and mothers, elders and babies, all fell to the bloodied panga of Mau Mau. This was as shocking to Africans as it was to Europeans - and this, Europeans failed to understand. It is this lack of comprehension that makes this book an excellent study of the cultural shock and misunderstanding that arose at the interface between colonist and colonizer.
Mau Mau represented not just rebellion against the injustice inflicted by British colonials, but against traditional African leadership and culture. The question I am left with is why the extreme brutality of MAu Mau arose? The absence of an explanation for this reflects perhaps that although Anderson recounts the history superbly, he really does not succeed in analyzing the mental frameworks of either the settlers or Mau Mau MAu. He never gets to grips adequately with the internalized fears of settlers in Africa or the cultural dislocation arising between Mau MAu and the rest of the Kikuyu tribe. What we are left with is a narration of evil that has sound historical underpinning but an almost non-existent cultural and psychological framework that would permit us to understand the actions of the protagonists at an emotional level. But the murderous actions of all parties remain clear and remain instructive to us in the current age....
Balancing Mau Mau evil with the mass hangings inflicted by the British brings one, once more, to the inevitable conclusion that ALL killing, state sponsored or otherwise was and is, wrong. Neither the British nor Mau Mau come out of this cleanly. We might well reflect on this point when we consider the plight of Israelis and Palestinians in the present.
There is so much more to say about this book, but these are my foremost initial observations. A superb and scholarly book that I shall be using as a resource for many years to come. Read more ›

40 of 48 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Shadow of empire February 2, 2005

By John C. Landon

Format:Hardcover

This expose of the English colonial history of Kenya does a good job setting the record straight on some key issues, and brings to light the suppressed shadow side of the endgme during the period of the Mau Mau. The infamous reputation of the Mau Mau always deflected attention from the totally inept and repressive nature of the last hurrah of the colonialists in the sunset of the British Empire. The colonialization of Kenya was ill-conceived and predatory from the start, and the whole history was a riddled with a set of contradictions, such as the artificial creation of the exploitative white settler culture dooming Kenyan development from the first. You cannot let loose such a gang of people such as the white settler crowd, poor white trash in a true sense, without the rapid appearance of a malignant culture and infrastructure. This account brings to light what was quickly downplayed, the massive repression of the Kikuyu during the Emergency, with the creation of acutal Gulags. The depiction of many of the judicial processes of the period, including the trial of Jomo Kenyatta, is of a mockery of justice. The Kenyan style colony was really an instance of the Empire in decline from its nineteenth century peak and at least the British had the sense after Suez not to prolong the inevitable. See also _Imperial Reckoning_, by Elkins

30 of 37 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars White Settler Empire August 8, 2006

By W. Pue

Format:Paperback

As a professional legal historian with an interest in both social history (I was nurtured in "Warwick school" historiography) and in colonial legal histories I have a strong professional interest in the subject matter of David Anderson's account of the Mau Mau period in Kenya. The book is first-rate in all respects.

It is more than this however. Thoughtful and learned, it nonetheless reads beautifully.

The book resonated with my own family history however - as it will for many readers around the world. Born into the British Empire of the 1950's, I was raised in a British settler society (Canada), saluted the Union Jack in school each day, and heard stories of Dominion and Empire as I grew up. The British Empire was the best of all possible Empires and its treatment of subjects more humane than others (the USA "Indian Wars" provided particularly strong contrast for one raised in the prairie west). Part of an Irish diaspora family, my cousins lived and live in the old country but also in Canada, Australia, the United States, and New Zealand. One uncle lived out his days in India and one black sheep dedicated herself to a communist liberation of Ireland (another served Scotland Yard arresting suspected IRA terrorists: I think they never met).

Anderson's account of Mau Mau is disturbing, not just for explaining the violence on all sides and the state excesses conducted in the cause of "security" in times of "terror", but for its account of settler society in a colony where the "native" was in the numerical majority.

Ever-smug, Canadians are too prone to celebrate our country's commitment to civil liberties, human rights, and anti-racism.... The parcitular features that make Kenya's "White Highlanders" (as the settler society was known) seem vile, however, are features also present on both sides of the border in North America: the first-people's deprivation of lands; the denial of customary entitlements long-established under native law; the refusal of one generation to acknowledge the wrong-doings of their testators; the insistence on non-native political control; and subtle and not-so-subtle racism directed against the lands' first inhabitants.

Though the reader is drawn at every juncture to critical judgment of "White Highlanders", and - by necessary implication on the part of anyoone locating the book in its temporal and spatial context - white Rhodesians, and the creators of South Africa's apartheid state, no descendant of immigrants to any "settler land" can fail to recognize that their own status bears more relation to the "White Highlanders" than to the "native" victims of colonization.

HISTORIES OF THE HANGED is must-reading for settlers and their children everywhere.

Read against the background of telling classics such as Harold Cardinal's UNJUST SOCIETY, it is informative and disturbing in equal measure.

W. Wesley Pue,
Nemetz Chair in Legal History,
University of British Columbia Read more ›

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars loathsome task May 1, 2007

By W Boudville HALL OF FAMETOP 500 REVIEWERVINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover

With the fracas about the American prison at Abu Ghraib in Iraq, one could read this book for a different perspective. It looks back at the anti-colonial rebellion in Kenya after World War 2. Best remembered in Britain and the US for the depredations of the Mau Mau. Who were demonised as the terrorists of the 1950s. A war against the Mau Mau was portrayed as a war between civilisation and savagery. See "The Hunt for Kimathi" by Henderson, as an example of the British viewpoint.

But the book writes of a different reality. The Mau Mau were only part of the manifestation of a people rising up against European colonialism. The British resorted to harsh tactics, including the detention of 70 000 Kikuyu, without trial. Here in the text is another and different account of the Kenyan struggle. Independent of the British government, and sympathetic to the Kenyans. Not that the author holds any brief for the Kenyan-style socialism which Jomo Kenyatta pursued after independence.

As the title alludes, the book gives unstinting coverage of the death penalties handed out by the British, in a valiant but futile attempt to hold back the tide. The book reminds me of how in the late 70s, in Perth, Australia, a local newspaper interviewed a white bloke who had been one of the hangmen in Kenya. His job was to execute the convicted guerrillas. But not just hang. Often, the shock of the drop would decapacitate the head. And, in any event, the bowels would evacuate. He had to clean up the mess. "A loathsome task" and "nothing like [what] the movies" depict about the gallows.

To be fair to the British, they were at that time also executing people in Britain by hanging. Albeit in far smaller numbers.