Customer Reviews

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

5 star:		(11)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

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.

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.

I am not new to the subject of colonial attrocities in Africa, however this detailed account disturbed me. Relying on hundreds of interviews and a mountain of archival evidence, Caroline Elkins has brought to light a story of cruelty, perpetrated by the British Empire, which rivals the attrocities of the Soviet Gulags or the Nazi concentration camps.

I found that in parts of the book Elkins repeats herself however, which made for a few dry parts of the book.

This book deals with some very graphic material that Elkins does not hesitate to state repeatedly. If you read this book, be prepared to read of monstrous torture stories on men, women and children.

Overall, this was a fantastic book. I could hardly put it down.

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.

In response to Cunningham, I have to say that the problem the Mau Mau tried to address (white, really South African white land ownership in Kenya) still exists throughout former British South Africa. As such, it is a good thing that these people are turfed off their land, and that the land returns to the Kenyans, Zimbabweans, South Africans - all the people the NGO's will depict as "needy" and unable to take care of themselves. Guess what - farmers need land.

It is telling that in this day and age, anyone would try to justify the landgrabs of the British and the expropriation of millions of Africans that resulted. This is how backward these Whites in Africa still are. To this day, there are still individuals who want to return to the colonial ways.

To describe this book which is so dry and factual, as evil, because it rightly highlights the evil role of colonialism in today's dispensation is ridiculous, as well as insulting to every ethical and right thinking human being alive. It were the Germans who invented the civilian concentration camp when they tried to suppress and annihilate the Herero people of Namibia, but it were the British who perfected it, in imprisoning thousands of African and Boer civilians, during the Boer War. That they did the same thing after WWII, when we all were supposed to know better, is perhaps even more shameful.

It is time, that the people of Africa were compensated for their maltreatment, their dispossession, the murder of their elected leaders by the West and local Whites, and the West's and minority white government's decade long support for the most brutal dictators.

In the end, all the white self-justification can not stand up to one simple question: What were the British doing in Kenya, and what on earth gave them the unbelievable arrogance, that they thought they were entitled to tell the people what to, or how to live?? (And for British, fill in Dutch, Belgian, French, Italian, German, etc.) So what if the Mau Mau were killing a few British civilians? Britain did not have a right to be there in the first place.

In the end, colonialism was not about civilization, or spreading christianity, and most definitely not about spreading democracy. It was about exploitation of the national resourses of other people, other countries. It was about theft; the taking of property, land and labour, without paying for it. And the mass murder that made it possible.

As a young Kikuyu man, the tales in this book are not new to me. However, they are more detailed and more chronologically arranged than what my elders passed on to me.
Carol's book serves as a series of very important pieces of a puzzle that is my people's history. I now know why my elders did not go into details of those dark days, instead they always sum up by saying, "let's end the story here, you would had to have been there."

This magnificent book shows how the Brits, using methods of immense savagery, broke the Mau Mau terrorist movement in the 1950s, only to lose the entire colony of Kenya partly in response to the brutishness of their own counterterrorism.
Even though the author is an academic, and doesn't write with the verve and polish of a William Manchester, this book is gripping reading. Elkins lets the facts tell the story, and she certainly has the facts. She seems to have read every relevant document and talked with practically everybody still living who participated in the Kenyan gulag as either a victim or a perpetrator. In her acknowledgements she notes that she learned both Kiswahil and the rudiments of Kikuyu to help her with her interviews (she also had an African translator). Indeed, her book would have been impossible without the Africans' contributions.
One of the other reviewers here complains that Elkins didn't read Robert Ruark's pro-settler "Something of Value" or "Uhuru." But Ruark, an American who probably didn't talk to any Africans in Kenya except his askaris and houseboys, was a naive sucker for the settlers' racist world view. Far more tough-minded than Ruark, Elkins talked to plenty of settlers as well as Africans. The sheer accretion of facts and anecdotes, with almost every sentence footnoted, makes for an overwhelmingly persuasive case.
It is a horrific story of a system that Stalin outdid in duration and magnitude, but not in relative cruelty. Pound for pound the Brits' imprisonment of the Kikuyus, rife as it was with mutilating torture, random executions, systematic rape, enforced relocations and treachery, and massacres, was about as brutal as it gets.
And we owe it to Elkins for bringing these facts, only occasionally referenced in journalism and earlier history books, fully into the light. This is a groundbreaking, iconoclastic work that sheds a new, highly unflattering light on British imperialism. It's tough to think of Manchester's hero biographee, Churchill, in quite the same way.

My views of Elkins book come with the caveat that in 2007 the demographer John Blacker, writing in African Affairs, demonstrated in detail that Elkins' estimates of casualties were grossly over estimated.

What I find interested about the text is the time frame. Less than a decade after fight the Nazis, the british empire continued to impose it might against those that fought to liberate the so-called mother country. The author rightfully look at the history by presenting evidence about the British deaths at the hands of the Mau Mau fight for land reclamation which became a fight for national liberation.

What the Brutish fear the Nazis might do to them became a mean in Kenya. I am sure some readers might have an issue with the author presented facts instead of the long held british media frieindly slants that has been the standard for over half a century. It is good to get the views of the oppressed and liberation fighters who lived under british brutish rule.

I thanks the author for writing this book. In fact, the author started her research with a pro-british view and by the end realized that the colonizers were the terrorists.

This book is without a doubt an invaluable addition to our current knowledge on British rule in Kenya at the end of Empire. I salute the author for the years of painstaking research done in Kenya, piecing together the largely untold story of the hundreds of thousands of Kikuyu peoples that suffered and perished during the British colonial emergency. This is a story that will capture the attention not just of Britons and Kenyans but of anyone interested in the dark underbelly of European colonialism that has only began to be increasingly exposed relatively recently.

Indeed, Elkins' work lends weight to a growing body of scholarship today aimed at sharpening the focus on the gritty realities surrounding British rule over her Afro-Asian `dependent empire'. The high-handed and brutal enforcement of British authority on colonial Kenya is all the more striking for occurring in the 1950s, at a time when British imperial power was supposedly on the decline and decolonisation in Africa well underway.

The book also brings to light an episode in Kenyan history that the country has largely chosen to forget in the wake of her independence. The Mau Mau revolt, liberation movement as it was, deeply divided the country; but sufficient time has passed since the event to allow for more sober analysis. Elkins' book is timely for revisiting this obscured episode in Kenya's past at a time when it still resides within the living memory of eyewitnesses and survivors, but is also distanced enough from actual events so as not to excite unhealthy tensions.

Those who criticise the book for being repetitious miss the point. Whilst there are books out there designed to deliver the sharp and occasional insight, there are also others, like this one, that set out to hammer home a single point with maximum force. Elkins' profuse descriptions of the graphic horror of the situation in Kenya work to good effect as the reader is confronted with atrocity upon atrocity and plight upon plight suffered by the hapless Kikuyu. A most compelling read.

I find myself giving this book only 4 stars out of 5, however, precisely because of its single-mindedness in bludgeoning home to the reader the plight of the Kikuyu. In the process, Elkins sacrifices more balance in her account, which could have paid greater attention to the dehumanising atrocities committed by the Mau Mau themselves, or to the inter-tribal vendettas that ran rife alongside British oppression. Elkins' one-sidedness is perhaps inevitable considering her having spent years sharing in the past sufferings of the many Kenyans she interviewed. Nonetheless, her vivid descriptions verge on the mildly sensational at points, and some stats appear slightly inflated.

The book is on the whole an excellent piece of historical research and writing, and I would highly recommend it.