Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain's Gulag in Kenya [Hardcover]

Caroline Elkins (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: December 23, 2004 | ISBN-10: 0805076530 | ISBN-13: 978-0805076530 | Edition: First Edition

A major work of history that for the first time reveals the violence and terror at the heart of Britain's civilizing mission in Kenya

As part of the Allied forces, thousands of Kenyans fought alongside the British in World War II. But just a few years after the defeat of Hitler, the British colonial government detained nearly the entire population of Kenya's largest ethnic minority, the Kikuyu-some one and a half million people.

The compelling story of the system of prisons and work camps where thousands met their deaths has remained largely untold-the victim of a determined effort by the British to destroy all official records of their attempts to stop the Mau Mau uprising, the Kikuyu people's ultimately successful bid for Kenyan independence.

Caroline Elkins, an assistant professor of history at Harvard University, spent a decade in London, Nairobi, and the Kenyan countryside interviewing hundreds of Kikuyu men and women who survived the British camps, as well as the British and African loyalists who detained them.

The result is an unforgettable account of the unraveling of the British colonial empire in Kenya-a pivotal moment in twentieth- century history with chilling parallels to America's own imperial project.

 

Imperial Reckoning is the winner of the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for Nonfiction.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Forty years after Kenyan independence from Britain, the words "Mau Mau" still conjure images of crazed savages hacking up hapless white settlers with machetes. The British Colonial Office, struggling to preserve its far-flung empire of dependencies after World War II, spread hysteria about Kenya's Mau Mau independence movement by depicting its supporters among the Kikuyu people as irrational terrorists and monsters. Caroline Elkins, a historian at Harvard University, has done a masterful job setting the record straight in her epic investigation, Imperial Reckoning. After years of research in London and Kenya, including interviews with hundreds of Kenyans, settlers, and former British officials, Elkins has written the first book about the eight-year British war against the Mau Mau.

She concludes that the war, one of the bloodiest and most protracted decolonization struggles of the past century, was anything but the "civilizing mission" portrayed by British propagandists and settlers. Instead, Britain engaged in an amazingly brutal campaign of ethnic cleansing that seemed to border on outright genocide. While only 32 white settlers were killed by Mau Mau insurgents, Elkins reports that tens of thousands of Kenyans were slaughtered, perhaps up to 300,000. The British also interned the entire 1.5 million population of Kikuyu, the colony's largest ethnic group, in barbed-wire villages, forced-labour reserves where famine and disease ran rampant, and prison camps that Elkins describes as the Kenyan "Gulag." The Kikuyu were subjected to unimaginable torture, or "screening," as British officials called it, which included being whipped, beaten, sodomized, castrated, burned, and forced to eat feces and drink urine. British officials later destroyed almost all official records of the campaign. Elkins infuses her account with the riveting stories of individual Kikuyu detainees, settlers, British officials, and soldiers. This is a stunning narrative that finally sheds light on a misunderstood war for which no one has yet been held officially accountable. --Alex Roslin

From Publishers Weekly

In a major historical study, Elkins, an assistant professor of history at Harvard, relates the gruesome, little-known story of the mass internment and murder of thousands of Kenyans at the hands of the British in the last years of imperial rule. Beginning with a trenchant account of British colonial enterprise in Kenya, Elkins charts white supremacy's impact on Kenya's largest ethnic group, the Kikuyu, and the radicalization of a Kikuyu faction sworn by tribal oath to extremism known as Mau Mau. Elkins recounts how in the late 1940s horrific Mau Mau murders of white settlers on their isolated farms led the British government to declare a state of emergency that lasted until 1960, legitimating a decade-long assault on the Kikuyu. First, the British blatantly rigged the trial of and imprisoned the moderate leader Jomo Kenyatta (later Kenya's first postindependence prime minister). Beginning in 1953, they deported or detained 1.4 million Kikuyu, who were systematically "screened," and in many cases tortured, to determine the extent of their Mau Mau sympathies. Having combed public archives in London and Kenya and conducted extensive interviews with both Kikuyu survivors and settlers, Elkins exposes the hypocrisy of Britain's supposed colonial "civilizing mission" and its subsequent coverups. A profoundly chilling portrait of the inherent racism and violence of "colonial logic," Elkins's account was also the subject of a 2002 BBC documentary entitled Kenya: White Terror. Her superbly written and impassioned book deserves the widest possible readership. B&w photos, maps.
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Product Details

• Hardcover: 496 pages
• Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.; First Edition edition (December 23, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0805076530
• ISBN-13: 978-0805076530
• Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 6.1 x 1.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.8 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (26 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #875,877 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

91 of 112 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Fascinating History, Slightly Turgid Writing, February 8, 2005

By 

Todd and In Charge (Miami, FL) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain's Gulag in Kenya (Hardcover)

First off, let me congratulate the author, an assistant professor at Harvard, for her solid research and documentation regarding a very specific period in Britain's colonial experience (and of course Kenya's history): the post-WWII Mau Mau rebellion, leading to Kenyatta's ascendency as leader of a free Kenya. Unfortunately, her writing skills are not on par with her research abilities, and the book often feels like an extended graduate paper, badly in need of expert revision and editing. The writing style is slightly stale and turgid, so even exciting events are flattened and reduced to yet another episode of graduate study documentation.

Also, while I am for the most part in agreement with the views of the author and no fan of the British empire or its impact on colonial cultures, I must say Ms. Elkins is a bit over-the-top in her defense of the Mau Mau rebels and her indictment of their British overlords. It's rare in 2005 to see an author boldly defending the local African custom of female genital circumcision, or the blood oaths of the Mau Mau which required taking a life and ingesting parts of the human sacrifice.

On the whole, the book is an impressive first effort and a solid example of graduate-level research. I believe a more textured, nuanced approach to this material can be written, building on the first-hand accounts that Ms. Elkins has so comprehensively collected.

60 of 77 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent study of imperialism in action, May 4, 2005

By 

William Podmore (London United Kingdom) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain's Gulag in Kenya (Hardcover)

Some claim that the British Empire was run well and handed over peacefully, unlike the Belgian Congo or French Algeria (both backed by the British state anyway).

This outstanding book exposes those lies, showing how colonial government forces in Kenya killed between 200,000 and 300,000 people in the 1950s. Elkins details the government `campaign of terror, dehumanizing torture, and genocide' marked by detention without trial, forced labour, collective punishments, deprivation of medical care, systematic starvation and murders.

The colonial government stole the Kenyan people's land, starved them and then blamed them for not feeding their children properly. Using the same tactics as in South Africa and Malaya, the imperial forces torched the homes of a million Kenyans then forcibly resettled them into compounds behind barbed wire.

The people resisted and fought for their freedom. The judge at the nationalist leaders' trial, who got £20,000 for his verdict, admitted that it was a national liberation struggle when he denounced `this foul scheme of driving the Europeans from Kenya'.

The British government demonised all who opposed colonialism as `terrorists'. It detained without trial up to 320,000 people in punishment camps, where the official policy was systematic brutality, using sexual violence and humiliation. Guards were indoctrinated into a fascist mentality, describing and treating Africans as animals. The assistant police commissioner said that camp conditions were worse than he had experienced in Japanese POW camps.

Critics asked how many camps were run by British forces. How many people had been arrested and detained? On what charges? Were they made to work in the camps? If so, for how long and in what conditions? Was there any disease or malnutrition in the camps? Were there any deaths?

The British government tried to maintain the absolute virtue of its rule by admitting nothing, lying systematically. `Incidents' of abuse were always `isolated', carried out by the lowest members of the colonial hierarchy. It set up powerless internal inquiries run by those responsible for the atrocities. It smeared nationalist leaders, witnesses and critics as `self-interested' and `prejudiced'.

The Empire was no civilising mission; it was a way to steal other people's land and labour power and murder them when they resisted.

24 of 30 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars An important story interred in academic prose, August 20, 2006

By 

Steve Summers (San Diego) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

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This review is from: Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain's Gulag in Kenya (Hardcover)

Imperial Reckoning is a curiously disappointing book. It exposes us to a shockingly brutal and little known side of late empire British imperialism with overwhelming documentation, but in such flat prose that the horror and indignation proper to such events is leached away in a numbingly endless drizzzle of facts. This book seems a huge body of tragic facts in search of an organizing narrative. So much so that its chapters could be read in any random order without changing the book's overall readability. Historical tragedies, as much as heroic triumphs turn on random quirks of fortune and clashes of strong personalities, but in academic literature they seem to float on a sluggish tide of inevitable events, usually seen in retrospect and shrouded in a sanctified flotsam of documentation.

Professor Elkins gives some capsule vignettes of the principal colonial administrators, but the central player of this historical drama, Jomo Kenyatta--the colony's most famous political prisoner and later to become Kenya's first president, is presumed so familiar to the reader as to warrant almost no further space. Though he is mentioned repeatedly, we learn only enough about him (16 years in Britain, studied at the London School of Economics, wrote a controversial book, organized a pan-African conference) to make us wonder why he's barely a footnote participant in the story. Little of the temper of the colonial times seems to surface except allegations of an extreme and virtually universal British racism. The Mau Mau terror which inspired this ghastly holocaust seems in this account have been a mere handful of assassinations--so wildly disproportionate to the response that one feels uneasily suspicious. Were the colonials really that murderously bigoted or is Ms. Elkins reluctant to portray a real threat of native terror?

It's a book one wishes had been written by Adam Hochschild (King Leopold's Ghost, Bury the Chains). There's a shocking story buried here that needs to get out. My curiosity is aroused, I want to know more, but I'll have to read a different book. I haven't the tolerance for tedium to finish this one.