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

~ Caroline Elkins (Author)

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. (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: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (23 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #106,788 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

73 of 86 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

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.

53 of 67 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 (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

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.

39 of 49 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Underreported History, February 14, 2005

By	AK van Deelen "Alex K. van Deelen" (The Hague, The Netherlands) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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.