Britain's Gulag: The Brutal End of Empire in Kenya

by Caroline Elkins

Only a few years after Britain's participation in the victory over fascism came the Mau Mau uprising in Kenya - a mass armed rebellion by the Kikuyu people, demanding the return of their land and freedom. The draconian response of Britain's colonial government was to detain nearly the entire Kikuyu population of 1.5 million and to portray them as sub-human savages. Detainees in their thousands - possibly a hundred thousand or more - died from exhaustion, disease, starvation and systemic physical brutality. For decades these events remained untold.

Caroline Elkins conducted years of research to piece together this story, unearthing reams of documents and interviewing several hundred Kikuyu survivors. Britain's Gulag reveals, for the first time, the full savagery of the Mau Mau war and the ruthless determination with which Britain sought to control its empire.

Genres: History, Africa, Nonfiction, Kenya, British Literature, Politics, War

496 pages, Paperback

First published January 11, 2005

About the author

Caroline Elkins is Professor of History and of African and African American Studies at Harvard University, the Thomas Henry Carroll/Ford Foundation Professor at Harvard Business School, Affiliated Professor at Harvard Law School, and the Founding Oppenheimer Director of Harvard's Center for African Studies.

Reviews

[John · Rating 5 out of 5]

Can't give it anything other than five stars, as it accomplishes everything it sets out to do, and is vivid and readable and very thorough. Not the kind of book that the casual reader who likes a little history now and then is going to really enjoy. Not that I think the casual reader is going to have a lot of trouble understanding it, but do you really want to immerse yourself in the world of concentration camps and secret torture and execution in 1950s Kenya? I'm not sure you do.
The thing that is so hard to believe about this book is that the British, immediately after fighting against and defeating the Nazis, and liberating the Nazi concentration camps, were able to justify to themselves the detention of thousands of Africans in concentration camps. It doesn't even seem like the British people in charge thought very much about the connection. In a way the stories of torture and execution and all that are not so unbelievable; After all, there are always going to be sociopaths in any population. No matter what nation on earth you are talking about, you can find people in it willing to torture and kill people. But for the government of Britain, right up to the prime minister, to knowingly fracture the Geneva conventions and institute forced labor and torture and detention without trial, not even a decade after the end of WWII...it's just crazy.
This book is also good as an example of a historian's painstaking research process, which is probably why it was mentioned as possible summer reading by my history professors. Ms. Elkins worked on this for a decade, traveling to three continents to find whatever documents she could that hadn't been destroyed by the British, interviewing hundreds of people in Africa and Britain, cross-checking stories she heard with newspaper records and letters and other stories: her book really is a remarkable piece of work.

[Dan · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book won the Pulitzer Prize for Non Fiction in 2005. Caroline Elkins is a Professor of African Studies at Harvard.

Kenya did not gain her independence from the British until 1963. In this hefty investigative and scholarly history Elkins documents the brutal lengths that the British Colonialists went to in order to suppress the sometimes militant Mau Mau in the ten years preceding independence. During this same period in Great Britain the Labor party had very little influence in the government so many of these crimes were not investigated by the opposition party or the press. Even many clergy in Kenya were complicit because much of their missionary support was routed through the Colonial government. Finally in the 1960’s when the secret of the atrocities were somewhat out of the bag then soon after a dozen other African Colonies controlled by the British were granted independence. The British Labor Party was in charge and with the radical shift most all of the African colonies were granted their independence by the end of the 1960’s. The level of racism on the part of the Colonialists was shockingly high in Kenya specifically and the self interests of white landowners and coffee farmers were also a significant factor in why the atrocities were committed.

In the previous ten-year period the brutality was inflicted on many Kikuyu by British colonialists and loyalist Kenyans. Despite whites accounting for less than 1% of Kenya’s population in the 1950’s, the indignant British colonials, rather than allowing Kenyans to govern themselves, looked at themselves as protectors in a perverted sense and developed a campaign to label the Mau Mau, a subset of the Kikuyu and one of the largest tribes in Kenya, as terrorists. In 1953 they jailed leader Jomo Kenyatta for 10 years. Incidentally upon his release he became Kenya’s first prime minister.

To protect her interests the Colonial government liquidated thousands of Mau Mau, many were beaten and tortured to death in concentration camps and men and women were routinely raped in others. More than 100,000 Mau Mau were forced into the dozens of internee camps and they were relocated from not just rural areas but from middle class neighborhoods in Nairobi. Shop owners, auto mechanics, and those from nearly every occupation, it didn’t matter.

In retrospect it is hard to understand why the government went to such extraordinary lengths to maintain a strangle hold on a non-strategic territory. The plausible explanation is that collectively in Africa there were many colonies that the British were at risk of losing and succor would open Pandora’s box to all others. The conservative party in power - under PMs Churchill, Eden, and Macmillan during this period - covered up these heinous acts because its power structure was threatened.

4 stars. Elkins researched the book for more than a decade and received no cooperation from the British government who has long since sealed the records on Kenya. I would have liked to have seen the author provide more of a history and overall context on Kenya. But overall the message and details are important for everyone to learn.

[Mike · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was an amazing book. I have several books about the Mau Mau uprising from the British perspective. This one starts off talking about the depredations of Kikuyu rebels, then talks about the establishment of concentration camps by the British. Detailed discussion is given to sadism, racism, rape, sexual assault, castration, and murders committed by the British and their allies against members of the Kikuyu tribe. The story is sickening if only half of it is true.

This is a very good book about the end of colonial Kenya but is not for the faint of heart.

[Tinea · Rating 5 out of 5]

Imperial Reckoning is a brick-by-brick wall of history created to be a record, a tool, evidence, where the original record was packed away, rewritten, denied, burned, tortured into silence or murdered. Elkins succeeds: she has built a wall of Truth that survivors and truth-seekers can lean on, stand upon, or find comfort in its long, validating, remembering shadow.

Britain's gulag in Kenya was a systematic extermination process undertaken with the lessons of the Shoah at hand-- meaning, they learned and applied the science of ideological, cultural, and ethnic genocide that the British fought against in WWII. Elkins demonstrates how the colonial officials squirmed and twisted to justify their actions that clearly contravened Geneva and other human rights conventions; they did this mostly by redefining who counts as human. The British targeted a loose idea called "Mau Mau" which they stretched to mean resistance to settler colonialism, land loss, and enslavement in any form; eventually "Mau Mau" became stand-in for all Kikuyu people, and the detention-torture methods targeting an ideology and collective punishment of supporters of a militia expanded to the enclosure-starvation cleansing of a people.

This book is awful. Elkins painstakingly details the individual human experiences of Kikuyu survivors of the British war on Mau Mau, as often as possible in their own words based on years of collection of oral histories. The gulag exerted itself intimately on the bodies of its victims: sexualized tortures including castration with hammers (I mean: breaking men's scrotums with hammers, sick sick sick), forcing hot or jagged or caustic (gasoline) or living (insects, rodents, rapists) things into rectums and vaginas, and degradation through shit poured on or in people. I wrote that last sentence in passive tense, but Elkins does not. She wrote this book to name names, to document the orders and who gave them, to provide irrefutable proof that the perverse, intimate sadism of this torture was also widespread, systematic, well-known and endorsed by level upon level of actor with power to intervene, stop it, report it, or do anything at all to end or limit or expose suffering (which they did not). The survivors' words are backed by others' and supported by meticulous citations of the colonial powers' own documents and contemporary media to confirm the memories and demonstrate how routine these shocking tortures were.

Elkins' work demonstrates that the mass atrocity in Kenya was eliminationist. The torture was a component of a large-scale internment (in camps) and enclosure (in "villages" surrounded by barbed fencing and policed movement) that physically removed Kikuyu people from the land white settlers wanted. This removal was bolstered by deaths from disease, malnutrition, and starvation, a direct, purposeful result of overcrowded and underfed internment camps and, on a mass scale, movement restrictions that disrupted agriculture. Enslavement turned Kikuyu into a labor pool for the white settler farmers and their rural infrastructure. Britain's gulag in Kenya was an example of totalitarian control of a population's living quarters, movement, activities, relationships, and-- through the bizarre obsession with verbal "confession" of Mau Mau sympathies-- minds, all for the economic benefit of a white settler class.

There is a bit of room to breathe as a reader, as Elkins gives us chapters of resistance. She lets shine the brilliance of men in torture-work camps who created means to communicate across distances and laid out codes of behavior to reinforce solidarity and create space for kindness and humanity amidst the cruelty. Did you know that hundreds of internees wrote and smuggled letters shouting their abuse to all levels of authorities and press while it was happening? Separated families fought to find each other. Starving people shared food. Villagers, collectively and personally punished, kept supply lines open to nourish the resistance fighters. Under penalty of unimaginable tortures, many thousands refused to confess an oath or denounce a comrade-- for no material benefit, as the British only escalated the torture and their totalitarian war on Mau Mau meant silence didn't create safety since those protected were already in the net-- but still they refused. 50 years later and supported by evidence documented by Elkins, they prosecute.

[Mike · Rating 1 out of 5]

Nope. 1/2 Star for this poorly written and organized account. Have to look elsewhere for a good history of Kenya and the end of empire.

[Joan · Rating 2 out of 5]

If I could, I would give it a 2.5.

The book was the author's dissertation on the Mau Mau uprising of the Kikuyu people in Kenya during the end of the colonial era. Specifically, it detailed the imprisonment of hundreds of thousands of Kikuyu in the Pipeline, a huge prison system designed to draw from prisoners confessions of their allegiance to the Mau Mau cause. The confessions were forced from prisoners through torture so brutal, it is absolutely disgusting to read. Most of the record of all of this was intentionally destroyed, and there has never been a major investigation of it--this is the authors attempt to document this history before the witnesses are all dead.

I knew very little about the colonial history of Kenya, and had never read a book on Kenya aside from Out of Africa, and I really enjoyed learning more about it.

That said, it took me over a month to finish because it is quite long and quite dense, with all of the names of the colonial officers, loyalists, MPs, etc. For my purposes, it was way too much, and I would not recommend it to anyone other than someone studying Kenya for school, for travel, or for some other reason that makes knowing all of the details important.

Some aspects of the book that were particularly interesting to me were (shocker) the gender issues. That Kikuyu practiced FGM and that the right to do so was a rallying cry for nationalism and independence; the sexual torture of female prisoners as related to nationalism and genocide; the sexual torture of Kikuyu women not imprisoned as related to land-ownership and national control; machismo as related to sexual torture of one's wife/child/sister mother; machismo as related to wife bearing non-Kikuyu or mixed child.

Also interesting was the candid analysis of the effectiveness of torture from the victims themselves--that sometimes it worked, and sometimes, it forced false confessions and provided bad information. All the time, though, it dehumanized.

[Judy Jorgensen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Today marks 53 years since Kenya gained independence from the British colonialists. I participated in the collection of stories for this book. I spoke to victims of the British gulag, some of whom were my grandparents. Caroline's book may not be to everyone's taste, but it tells the truth of what my people went through at the brutal hands of the British colonialists. It shows the untold story. This culmination of evidence forced the British government to apologise, after years of denying that they had sent MauMau loyalists into concentration like camps *gulags*, the government finally to reparated victims of the British authorities.

My grandparents lost their property during the removal from their homes into concentration camps. My mother has no idea of when she was born because all the documents that could have proved her birth date got burnt during the removal from her parents home. Today we estimate how old she could have been when Kenya gained independence in 1965.

The Imperial Reckoning gave the victims a much-needed catharsis, although some of them went to their graves bitter at what the colonialist had done to them - through castration and forced labour.

Once again, this book is intense because it tells the uncomfortable truth, that many people would rather not know or would like to deny.

[William Leight · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is very hard to read, though not because of the quality of the prose. Elkins covers the background to the Mau Mau uprising in Kenya, the deliberations on how to respond to it by the colonial leadership in Nairobi and the British government, and the resulting protests and calls for inquiries by missionaries, journalists, and Labor MPs, but a good half or more of the book details day-to-day life as it was experienced by practically all Kikuyu, with the exception of a small cadre of loyalists (and the actual forest guerrillas, though once captured they mostly went to the same camps), during the Kenyan Emergency. Which means that it's a catalogue of beating, torture, rape, starvation, slave labor, disease, arbitrary execution, and a kind of barbarous cruelty that makes the British claim that they were defending civilization against Mau Mau savagery a kind of sick joke (and one that rapidly gets old), all bathed in a toxic racism. A few pages of this leaves you feeling a kind of generalized anger combined with dull despair, not exactly the best frame of mind for reading.

The British response to the Mau Mau uprising -- itself largely a response to continued British land theft: when the British stopped tolerating Kikuyu squatters on land given to white settlers and insisted on returning all Kikuyu to the relatively small reserves they had set aside from them, an explosion was almost inevitable -- and a few early Mau Mau atrocities was to put practically all Kikuyu men of fighting age into a system of camps known as the Pipeline. The goal of the pipeline was to force the prisoners to confess to being part of Mau Mau and renounce it: this was largely accomplished through so-called "screening" sessions, in which detainees were tortured until they confessed. (Later in the Emergency, something called "dilution" was implemented: this meant that the torture was far more systematic.) Beatings were routine, living quarters were rudimentary, health and sanitation facilities practically nonexistent. The detainees were forced to work on various infrastructure projects: if they refused, they were literally starved into submission. British and Kenyan settler security forces in the camps often killed detainees for fun. But suppose a detainee survived, confessed, and was cooperative enough to be released (by the end of the Emergency, not too much cooperation was required, as the British were desperate to empty the camps): what then? Well, he was sent back to the Kikuyu reservation, where he discovered that his house had been burned down and any remaining possessions taken and his family forced into a "barbed wire village", i.e. a concentration camp (one that they had been forced to construct themselves out of nothing). Life in the barbed wire villages, which were guarded by Kikuyu loyalists commanded by one or two British or white settler officers, was essentially the same as in the Pipeline, the main difference being that rather than being tortured to confess to being Mau Mau, those held in the villages were tortured to make them confess to supporting the guerrillas. The result was the death of somewhere between one and three hundred thousand Kikuyu, out of a pre-Emergency population of roughly 1.7 million: a massive crime against humanity.

One of the most amazing things about the book is how quickly the noble goals the Allies supposedly held in World War II were abandoned. The Mau Mau revolt took place in the '50s: many of the members of the British and local Kenyan security forces in Kenya were World War II veterans (as were a number of the Mau Mau fighters). Churchill was even Prime Minister for the first part of the Emergency. And yet Elkins quotes British veterans of the Japanese POW camps stating approvingly that the Pipeline was worse. Other members of the British security forces are quoted as unselfconsciously describing themselves as being part of a Kenyan Gestapo, and not because they were horrified by what they were doing. In the meantime, the British government was working hard at finding legal loopholes in various human rights conventions that the British themselves had been instrumental in creating as part of what was supposed to be the framework of a new, better world order. It's depressing (if not necessarily all that surprising) that so soon after what was trumpeted as the victory of democracy over fascism, the nominal democrats were adopting fascist tactics themselves.

The other amazing thing, of course, is how little of this is known. The Pipeline should be just as much a byword for cruelty as the gulag, and yet much of this history was unknown even to a highly educated person with an interest in history like me. There are some obvious reasons for this, of course: for Americans, the Soviets were the enemy, while the British were allies; the people in the gulag were white, while those in the Pipeline were black; Cold War propaganda presumably meant that any claims by African anti-colonial rebels were dismissed in the U.S. (although ironically enough the Cold War was also one of the reasons why the British were forced to allow Kenya to become independent: the U.S. was sick of Soviet propaganda exploiting anti-colonial wars in Africa). But Elkins also touches on one perhaps less obvious reason: the post-independence betrayal of the Kikuyu by their leaders, in particular Kenya's first president Jomo Kenyatta. During the Emergency, Kenyatta, imprisoned after a show trial, was demonized as the head of the Mau Mau. It was always clear that this was unfair, but after his release it became clear just how unfair it was, as Kenyatta worked closely with the British, the white settlers, and the Kikuyu loyalists (who had become quite rich by confiscating the land and goods of other Kikuyu) in the lead-up to independence to ensure that the transition was smooth, i.e. that none of the effects of the Emergency were undone and the only compensation paid out was that given to white settlers who abandoned their stolen land and went back to England or South Africa. Sadly, the final blow to the Kikuyu came from the man they thought would be their savior.

[Steve]

British colonial policy in Kenya, as elsewhere, had been to take large swaths of productive land from native populations for the benefit of white settlers, often emigrants from the home islands. Many of the expropriated were removed to reserves, usually of less productive agricultural quality. In the early 1950s discontent grew for land reform among the Kikuyu people, a group especially affected by British actions. As a result, many of the estimated 1.5 million Kikuyu, Kenya’s largest ethnic group, took the Mau Mau (etymology uncertain) oath, a pledge to confront British rule with violence, if necessary.

With the outbreak of hostilities in October 1952, the British civil administration reacted with a merciless crackdown, ultimately developing a detention and rehabilitation system, termed the Pipeline by one administrator, that lasted through the decade. Professor Elkins is careful in her estimates of camps and prisons in the Pipeline, which she believes numbered over one hundred, as well as the number of Kikuyu deaths. She notes, however, that somewhere between tens of thousands and a few hundred thousand Kikuyu perished in the 1950s as the British used the Pipeline to suppress dissent, force renunciation of the oaths and instill obedience to colonial authority. Those that survived the camps lived with the physical and emotional scars of unbelievable brutalities for their remaining years.

In the end, Kenya gained its independence in 1963, with one of the imprisoned Kikuyu, Jomo Kenyatta, the first president. But something interesting happened through the ensuing decades – the atrocities committed under British rule were forgotten, the many perpetrators skirted punishment, justice avoided. No senior British official ever stood in the dock to answer for these crimes. How Britain devised and executed its heinous Pipeline and the gaping historical amnesia that followed are the subjects of Professor Elkins dedicated research. To be clear, this work is not a history of the Mau Mau uprising – other books can supply that detail. Rather, the focus here is on documenting sustained British state crimes against an entire ethnic group of large size, where deserved, lasting international opprobrium failed to arise.

I have difficulty recording my thoughts for this book. I generally don’t have emotional reactions when I read, unless I count somnolence an emotion. Professor Elkin’s work caused noticeable discomfort because the history of Great Britain’s conduct in Kenya sickens and she includes no shortage of first-person descriptions detailing a broad spectrum of horrific inhumanities. This isn’t a story of racially motivated indifference leading to mass calamity, as in Bengal during the Second World War; instead, this is a story of an orchestrated attempt to eradicate a large ethnic group through policies endorsed at the top echelons of British government, then maintained for years through repeated coverups and lies. Today we refer to such conduct as genocide.

[Lady_Wira · Rating 5 out of 5]

Every now and then you have to read a complex book. You have to push through the pages to see what was. Such books leave you dazed and appreciative of the present. A book that demands to be read.

There are many books that cover colonization in Kenya and the Mau Mau uprising. But there is no book like Britain’s Gulag by Caroline Elkins. Caroline Elkins dives deep into what she knows is true, as hideous as it may be.

Britain’s Gulag covers the brutal history of colonization in Kenya. The Mau Mau uprising, and the draconian response of the British government. It tells of the evils meted on the Kikuyu population, the use of detention camps that held nearly five hundred people and how they were tortured and treated as less than human.

Covering the period starting 1952 to 1960. A period that saw over a hundred thousand Kenyans killed by diseases, exhaustion, torture, starvation and physical brutality.

The lessons taught in history class merely glide through the grotesque mistreatment of the Mau Mau, however, Caroline Elkins ensured that the truth did not go untold. This book is widely and deeply researched, the author took the time to do an extensive investigation, spoke to hundreds of survivors and unearthed mountains of documents that had been “lost”.

The brutality in the detention camps and the efforts to hide the truth make Britain’s Gulag a must-read for all, we need to understand what it was if we are to appreciate our freedoms. The colonisers’ ruthlessness and the Mau Mau pushback left me dumbfounded and proud to be Kenyan.

I do not disregard the effort that went into the making of this book. However, having to go through hundreds of one–on–one interview of similar experiences and searching through a myriad of material on the same topic birthed countless pages of repetitive reporting. As informative as it is, this 475-page book almost feels dragged out.

A vivid and accurate report on the cruel behaviour of the British, and the relentless spirit of Mau Mau. A daunting read. It is a book that requires attention, patience and a bit of a strong stomach.

[Timothy Riley · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was an eye-opening book and I read it at a time when Britain's role in the world and in Europe has been dramatically altered with their withdrawal from the EU. The importance of this book is understood when put in the context of the time. Britain had just helped defeat Germany in WWII and liberate concentration and death camps filled with people.
Only a handful of years later a group of Kenyans seek their freedom and independence and there are a few killings of white settlers. The Colonial government essentially "goes bananas" and institutes a decade long repression and systematic murder of, as some estimates put it, well over 100,000 Kikuyu Kenyans. The process began years before with the relocation of Kikuyu to "reserves" where they can be monitored and given less productive land to live on. As they felt the pressure of struggling to survive like they always have, the colonial government organizes a serious of round ups in Nairobi where the city was searched door to door and all Kikuyu of questionable politics are sent with only the clothes they have on their backs by truck to concentration camps. Their belongings and houses were given away or sold cheaply to more "loyal" Africans and sometimes white settlers. The Kikuyu farms are split up among their more loyal neighbors or white settlers. This struck me as half Salem witch-trials where people are given the opportunity to implicate people they have disputes with in order to seize their property-or wives and half 1950's Mississippi. People are sent away just from a nod of a loyalist head.
Once in work camps, holding camps or something akin to nazi death camps, Kikuyu are pressured to confess that they are part of the Mau Mau movement through torture. Those who refuse suffer more torture and are sent to the death or concentration camps. Many confess to stop the torture but are shipped away anyway to work camps where the slogans above the entrance are eerily similar to "arbeit macht frei". They are "through work comes freedom". These slave camps build dikes, sometimes just go dig ditches only to fill them in again, suffer from purposeful bad water, starved, whipped like slaves and beaten daily. Many die of disease and sometimes being murdered to make an example. The torture techniques are almost unbelievable.
This work was richly explained and well researched and definitely deserved the Pulitzer Prize that it won. I am sure British school kids are not taught how under the cloak of the mission to civilize savage Africans, British colonials repeated the same tactics they fought against only a decade earlier.
There have to be works out there that detail the actual war between the British and the Mau Mau. That is what is missing from this book. The camps are taken in isolation without putting them in the greater context of the war.

[Kuldip S Attalia · Rating 5 out of 5]

An extraordinary account and a must-read for those that wish to gain some insight into colonialism and the atrocities that have been committed in the name of so-called civilization. Very well-researched book. Its probably only of interest to those who study colonialism or have an interest in Kenya. Could be dry for those not interested in History. Highly recommended.

[Nicole Jean-Louis · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is essential reading. Go read it.

[Hassan Kassim · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was watching an Oxford debate on whether Britain owes it's former colonies reparations of any sorts for the atrocities brought to them by means of colonialism, when Shashi Tharoor, a brilliant writer, speaker and former politician stood and gave this fascinating point of view deserved of applause on what the British East India Company did to India. I was actually going to read on that when I remembered there was an Imperial British East Africa company that I know vaguely about, hence arriving at this horrifying book, thoroughly researched, Pulitzer prize winning book.

Imperial Reckoning documents the atrocities that Kenyans, mostly of Kikuyu descent underwent through Empire. Where when the foreigners arrived building the Kenya-Uganda railway, they sent word home that they had stumbled upon unoccupied fertile land. So settlers began coming in as early as 1895, traversing 'miles and miles of bloody Africa' only to face resistance from the Kikuyu(if I'm not mistaken, the first community in Africa to fight colonialism, before the Algerians.) and the British realised they would have to wipe out the entire Kikuyu population, like, a total mass cleansing for them to carry their agenda. So here you have a population who has been emasculated, owning neither land nor freedom being under white rule, limited in what they can farm, and then world war 2 breaks out and some of them taken as fighters in the white man's war. The Africans having had a missionary education, people like Jomo Kenyatta go out to the world and learn of these other black populations that earned their freedom and come back home with similar dreams(Mau mau had been in operation back then, but this knowledge added to their strength). And it's almost like I'm summarizing the first chapter alone.

A great portion of the book takes place during the 50s, from when the State of emergency was imposed to when it was lifted. As told by former maumau soldiers on life in the pipeline and how they were dominated by the British, from being sodomized with bottles and sticks and I'm watching a documentary on the same thing and you're seeing old country men who had lain their lives for this country saying they're basically useless, their manhood was taken away from them, kicked in their privates and others by means of pliers turned to eunuchs. They take you through the bodies they buried in different camps. The true figures downplayed and most records destroyed as the British left. And amidst all these horrors, some adjudicators are sent from South Africa and when the Kenyan representative back then asks if they feel like they're taking it too far with the violence, he's told compared to what the French are doing in Algeria, they're practically saints. (I wonder what went down in Algeria). Cause people died in thousands, hundreds of thousands even.

So, the State of emergency is lifted and the survivors are left to return home, and families meet in tears due to the things they had to do when separated. Some women with mixed raced children. Plus, women have jobs now, and their men are arriving still without their land. I'm watching the same documentary again and a man when he arrived home and couldn't perform his husbandly duty, and still needed to sire to carry the name, let his wife go out there and bear someone else's kids, though they don't tell the kids. It's heartbreaking cause it hits home, and it's a failure of the education system not having learned of any of this in school. Mau mau to me were just this rastafarian men who ....I don't even have a properly made opinions.

But we can't talk about this book without talking about Kenyatta, cause the two successive governments are the root cause of this state-imposed amnesia on our colonial history.

We begin with Kenyatta being this larger than life figure (which he was BTW, and the initial KANU manifesto was brilliant if it was adhered to.) So he goes on to the war, still well-respected home and after a more than a decade hiatus, he is back, and vaguely recollecting, founded KAU, and was against the violent ways of the MAUMAU, that even Waruhiu, the man who was shot and then imposed the state of emergency, he was there to convey his sympathies. We skip to his arrest, and the whole Kapenguria incident in Kitale, the hacking of the white child around his teddies that was aired all around the world on the terror of the MAUMAU (a household name that shook the western world), and Jomo is portrayed as the face of the MAUMAU.

As all of that is happening, the kikuyus are in camps, nicknaming guards like Mapigo, for one who just loved to beat, Tisatisa, one who would count detainees and beat the hell out of number 9. Hot eggs shoved into women's privates. A woman saying she saw a woman sucking a white man's privates, something she wouldn't have imagined possible, and many creative punishments that people had to endure.

While all of that is happening as well, we have people like Joseph Murumbi and Tom Mboya who was in the first LEGCO campaigning both overseas and at home for the release of Kenyatta, making him the president of KANU before he is released. I'm watching more retro videos I can find and you can see Tom Mboya being questioned about why they would make that decision(something to do with Oginga BTW) , he's asked isn't that a little backwards since they, kina Mboya, had more progressive views, and Tom has his head bowed and he says, he is our teacher.

Finally Jomo is released and due to the pressure back in Britain, the colonialists here have to give the country its independence, at least a decade earlier than they intended(a decade before they could civilize this savage population). Jomo Kenyatta gathers the settlers in a room, them scared now because this man was the terror they had been sold on, they wondered what he would do and Jomo gives a speech almost similar to what Mandela would say a few decades later, preaching of forgiveness, and the white people say Harambee.

Now, I'm mixing the chronology, and yeah, that does spell out like a victory for the Kenyans but it wasn't. Jomo is sworn in and instead of breaking the wheel completely, the first government was a continuity of the systems set up by the British, it's only the skin colour of the rulers that changed.

In his address Jomo Kenyatta 'dismissively' plays it, 'We have all fought for Uhuru' and urges people to forget the past and build the nation. Now, people had suffered and were hoping for the perpetrators of their pain to be punished, or at least their pain acknowledged, but that whole episode was just wiped away, which is why I initially said, we had a state-imposed amnesia, and no one was to talk about the past. Unlike in some African nations, where the settlers were to leave with only the clothes on their backs, in Kenya, Jomo gave them the option to buy back their land, and a huge portion of foreign aid was used to do that, he convince about 30,000 to stay, some headed for South Africa. The Africans who collaborated with the imperial regime weren't faced with any consequences, it actually felt like they were rewarded. And neighbours hated neighbours for what they did to each other, only the fabric of Christianity maintaining the peace. And intoxicated with power, Kenyatta changes and we're introduced to him looting public lands, as the people who fought for this country are kept back in the annuls of history, and not until recently, more than half a century later has any of this been looked into.

[Rene · Rating 4 out of 5]

The author discloses in the beginning of the book that this book was borne from her dissertation, and it reads as a dissertation. Elkin's central argument is that Britain deliberately and knowingly skirted around its own domestic and international laws in order to brutally crush the Kikuyu Mau Mau movement with torture, maiming, and widespread killing and indefinite detention of suspects. They did so because the dehumanization of the Kikuyu, already deep rooted in pervasive racism of the time. allowed any acts of violence from the Kikuyu to be seen as as a savage, animalistic threat to the survival of Kenya's white settler community and the very existence of the Britain's civilizing mission, while simultaneously seeing any Kikuyu grievances about British colonial policy as illegitimate and baseless and therefore unresolvable through official channels of redress available to the Kikuyu. The irony that Britain's Colonial office was willing to stoop to genital mutilation, beatings to the death and indefinite prison camps in order to protect their right to enlighten and civilize their colony does not slip by unnoticed.The author presents her argument based on extensive research--- including available government documentation, memoirs, papers, and oral histories. Therefore, this is not a broad-scoped history of Kenya, but a very tightly narrated one focused on the Mau Mau uprising, the British and white settler response, and how this all shaped Kenya's ultimate independence and emergence of it's first leader after independence, Jomo Kenyatta.

For that reason, this is not a good first introduction to colonialism in Africa, or for Kenyan history. A reader will get the most out of this book when they already have a basic knowledge of Britain's colonial empire, it's general colonial policies, and the time lines of its conquest and withdrawal of its colonial territories. The author does touch on these aspects when they are critical to understanding the context of the Mau Mau uprising, but in keeping true to the purpose of her book, she does not expand on them and a general reader that does not have any previous knowledge of historical context will very likely be overwhelmed trying to play-catch up with all the names, dates, and facts that are important supporting figures to the main textual argument here. If you come into it with a basic understanding of British Imperialism, then it is thorough, methodical yet easily understood and ordered progression through the Mau-Mau uprising. The extensive cover-ups and political posturing done by Britain's colonial office in London and on the ground in Kenya to allow them the ability to continue a practice they knew would not be tolerated nor sustainable with wide-spread knowledge and transparency back home is a sobering reminder of the pitfalls of even supposedly "democratic" governance.

I found this book to be well-thought out, well-supported, her argument convincing and well-grounded in fact, and her bibliography thorough and extensive. This is a definite read for someone interested in taking a deeper look at an important timeline in Kenyan and British history.

[Liam Ostermann · Rating 5 out of 5]

By the time I received this book from my library I was already reading Ms. Elkin's other book 'Legacy of Violence: A History of the British Empire, on violence and the British Empire as whole throughout the twentieth century. As a result I only read parts of this book, there is only so much I can take atone time and, though superb in its detailed examination of what happened in Kenya, I chose to read instead, in full, Legacy of Violence. What I said in my review could equally be said here. What is really significant and unpleasant is the comprehensive lies and distortions that have characterised the story of retreat from empire, particularly as it is told in connection with Kenya.

What is not surprising is that such murderous events took place. Britain never gave up any part of the empire willingly. The UK rewrote history and lied to itself about empire and the end of empire. It was nasty, bloody and shoddy with nothing of decency or honour. It is a long tale of an a little island in the North sea winning a 'historical' lottery by being in the right place at the right time with the right weapons and technology to dominate whole swathes of the globe (not at all unlike Spain in the 15th and 16th centuries). What luck provided was soon seen as divine providence and an immutable situation never to be changed. That so many decisions taken in the run up to independence, in Kenya or elsewhere, were made purely on the basis UK requirements, only made independence when it came a catalogue of failure is not surprising. That it has taken so long for this to be understood is understandable when you consider the lengths government at the time of independence (in Kenya and elsewhere) went to destroyer remove governments records. That so many were deposited 'by accident' at GCHQ (not unlike a UK Area 51 in terms of getting information out if it) indicates how lies have been propagated and kept by successive governments.

Please read this or Ms Elkin's other works. She deserves an OBE (the order of the British empire which is still profusely distributed every year) for her quest for the truth about the empire. But of course she will never receive one.

[Rebecca · Rating 3 out of 5]

An stunning and exhaustive account of Britain's gruesome suppression of the Mau Mau uprising in Kenya.

Elkins's work here has been widely criticized for overestimating the number of rebel casualties and for failing to represent equally the brutality employed by the Mau Mau fighers. The former critique seems to have been largely ratified by historians, but the latter strikes me as misguided.

Elkins does not set out to revise well-documented accounts of Mau Mau violence but to contextualize them against a vast and capricious system of colonial repression. Her project is to explore the hypocrisies of the British Colonial Office and its claims of civility and moral rectitude. To this end, Imperial Reckoning is a forceful indictment of Britain's administration of Kenya, revealing it to be at once incompetent, racist and willfully cruel.

This book certainly could have provided a more thorough and nuanced account of how the uprising was perceived by the broader Kenyan population (rather than by just the Kikuyu community and the white settlers), which would supply the reader with a better understanding of the rebellion's role in Kenya's ultimate decolonization. It also could have offered greater insight into the fractious politics within the Kikuyu community, which was divided by the war. But neither of these perspectives are within the relatively narrow scope of Elkins's project. It seems unfair to hold this book responsible for telling the whole history of the Mau Mau uprising. Rather, for a broader perspective, it seems supplementary reading is required.

[Notdarcy · Rating 1 out of 5]

Tendentious, sensational, Anglophobic and with a sloppy approach to demographics, this borders at times on an apology for Mau Mau atrocities against fellow Kenyans. Avoid.

[Bob · Rating 5 out of 5]

Chaps. 7-8 are probably the beginning of the most brutal chapters to get through, sometimes I read 10 pages before putting the book down
One quote in the Epilogue that joggled my memory was that of Jomo Kenyatta, something about looking forward & not dwelling on the past; instantly reminded me of Obama using the very same words, while adding “mistakes were made “ ; remembering his father was in Jomo Kenyatta’s cabinet.

( per Chat GPT ; Barack Obama's grandfather, Hussein Onyango Obama, was involved in the Kenyan independence movement , detained in Kenya during the Mau-Mau uprising in 1952 and, having spent two years in custody, complained of maltreatment and even torture at the hands of his African guards )

I was born in 1954, so most of this took place when I was a baby until I was in kindergarten.
I’m glad I read her second book first before reading this , even tho that was also filled with brutality, it wasn’t about one particular colony. If I read this 1st, I don’t believe I would’ve read her 2nd book
Having said that😂, another book in the torture genre I recommend, that was difficult to get through was Torture & Impunity by Alfred McCoy

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1...

[Tyler · Rating 4 out of 5]

A powerful, well-researched, well-written, and accessible account of the Mau Mau uprising in Kenya.

Not even a decade after the end of World War II and all of its well-publicized mass atrocities and the British are committing some of the same atrocities in Kenya. A scathing indictment of (and here's a shortlist)

The West's 'civilizing mission's - i.e. "if I need to kill you to civilize you, so be it..."

The UK's colonial attitude (which still persists);

Churchill's bloody tenure (Bengal Famine, anyone?);

Indirectly of the 'stiff upper lip' attitude - why didn't Askwith speak to Castle or Brockway, why did he think Baring or Lennox-Boyd would listen??, etc.; and

Of the Church, which was happy to be an accessory to the violence (reminding one of the decision by the Catholic Church's leadership to abet Hitler's crimes)

I really appreciated that Elkins included details around how the inmates and prisoners resisted in detention. That is something that I think is often overlooked; there are always forms of resistance, no matter how bleak the situation.

I was quite confused about the difference between Gavaghan's 'dilution technique' and the violence that had preceded it. It sounded pretty systematic and purposeful already, but by all accounts 'dilution' represented something different, new, and worse? Wasn't sure how.

[Kat V · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have never heard anything about this so I feel like I need to read this. Some of it is absolutely horrific and disgusting. I can’t believe nobody has made a big deal of this yet. This is honestly as infuriating and horrific as the Holocaust but on a smaller scale and I suppose fewer deaths per capita. 4.2 stars

[Don · Rating 5 out of 5]

Starred Book****
It is about Britan's smashing of the "Mau Mau" 1950s uprising. Now called Kenyans, they were driven off their land, fought back against the British and were crushed. It took a L O N G time for the British people to get the story because of the lies by the colonial administration. Horrors. Racism. British power at its worst. In the end the African Kenyatta took power and was very conservative so the British victory was complete.

[Graham Mulligan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Imperial Reckoning; The Untold Story of Britain’s Gulag in Kenya.
Caroline Elkins; Holt, 2005

This book is still widely read in Kenya; you see it on bookstore shelves everywhere. The author, Caroline Elkins, a Harvard history graduate in 1997, started researching the Mau Mau rebellion in 1995, looking at colonial archives in London, but in Kenya discovered many of the records pertaining to the period of ‘The Emergency’ were missing. The files that did remain, in London and in Nairobi, were the ones that painted a rosy picture of ‘detainee reform’ and Britain’s ‘civilizing mission’ in its African colony. Gradually piecing together bits of evidence, Elkins realized that the number of detainees reported officially was exaggeratedly low. The number of male detainees was four times the figure reported and women and children, although not ‘detainees’ like the men, were held in ‘villages’ behind barbed wire. In fact, the entire Kikuyu population was held captive by the British colonial administration. She turned to directly interviewing survivors of the Emergency. Gaining trust, she was able to accumulate over 600 hours of interviews. This is an important documentation because the survivors are now very elderly. In addition to the survivors, Elkins was able to interview some people from the other side of the conflict, missionaries and colonial administrators as well as some of the white settlers, always on condition of anonymity.

The Mau Mau rebellion is regarded as an important event because of many elements, including the timing and the nature of the struggle. The number of whites killed is less than a hundred (some sources say as few as 30); the number of black ‘loyalists’ was higher, perhaps 1800; the number of Kikuyu reported killed by the British was eleven thousand, but Elkins thinks it could be in the hundreds of thousands, in a ‘campaign to eliminate Kikuyu people’.

The first chapter of the book, Pax Britannica, lays out the sequence of events that produced the colonial state, physical, psychological and political. British East Africa, in the period known as the Scramble for Africa, was relatively ignored except for two important characteristics. Its location was important because it was flat enough to build a railroad from the coast inland to Lake Albert, the source of the White Nile. In nineteenth century thinking, the British feared an enemy that might be able to divert the source of the water into the Nile, thus threatening her position in Egypt and the Suez canal and ultimately access to India, her ‘jewel in the crown’. A railroad was envisioned that would permit her to get an army in position quickly to defend her territory. The 582-mile railroad was eventually begun in 1896 and completed in 1901. By 1920, the protectorate had become a formal colony. One other important feature of the landscape was the benign climate, especially near Mount Kenya. White Europeans could live here.

With the railway came diseases like smallpox and the arrogance of white supremacy. Over half a million Kikuyu migrated away from the railway into the central highlands. Drought and pestilence followed, leaving a vacant landscape that Britain sought to fill with settlers. The context was a declining British Empire, challenged more and more by a rapidly industrializing Germany and United States. The formerly successful strategy of ‘imperialism by free trade’ domination was collapsing and a new urgency to have the colonies pay for themselves was on the rise. The empire was managed by three institutions: the Colonial Office in London, the colonial governor and his administration in Kenya, and the man-on-the-spot provincial and district commissioners. Settlers fell into two socio-economic groups, small-scale farmers and aristocratic big men. Many settlers from South Africa were also attracted to Kenya, bringing with them a deeply racist attitude. Many of the British aristocratic settlers were disinherited second and third sons, losing out in the rigid system of primogeniture back home. Many of this class, large landholders on a small stage, set the tone for the white settler society.

The settler’s attitude toward black Africans shifted along the racist spectrum from ‘stupid, inferior, lazy and childlike to savage, barbaric, atavistic and animal-like’. The shift corresponded closely to the Africans unwillingness to be exploited. Kikuyu land, especially in the fertile Kiamba region near Nairobi, was taken by white settlers. The tradition amongst Kikuyu was for young men to find new land to farm when the time came to enter adulthood. In fact, to become an adult one had to have land. Tensions rose with the next generation hemmed in and the Kikuyu land declining in productivity from over-use by the 1930’s.

Socially, the destruction was critical. “To be a man or woman - to move from childhood to adulthood – a Kikuyu had to have access to land. A man needed land to accumulate the resources necessary to pay bridewealth for a wife or wives, who would in turn bear him children. Land and family entitled him to certain privileges within the Kikuyu patriarchy; without land a man would remain socially a boy. A woman needed land to grow crops to nurture and sustain her family; without it in the eyes of the Kikuyu she was not an adult. A Kikuyu could not be a Kikuyu without land.” (p.14).

Over time, four regulations pushed the Kikuyu off their remaining land and into the exploitive wage economy. First, the colonial government established African reserves, much like the Native reserves in North America. With insufficient land in the reserves, Africans had little choice but to seek work on European farms. The second regulation was a new hut and poll tax, payable in currency only, and equal to about two months African wages. The third regulation was the Kipande or employment pass required of all Africans. The Kipande was a small metal container, worn like a necklace, that recorded a persons name, fingerprint, ethnic group, past employment history, and current employer’s signature. The fourth regulation forbade Africans to grow the most profitable crops, such as tea, coffee and sisal. They could grow and sell maize but only through the price-controlled marketing boards.


Many Kikuyu found a way around the regulations as squatters, working on European farms for about a third of the year, in return for being able to cultivate a small plot and raise a family. Settlers, however, feared that they would demand tenant rights. This system lasted until 1917 when the colonial government transferred responsibility to the local district officers who in turn supported the white settler fear of the Africans.

From the earliest times, the local administration of government was carried out by appointing local Africans to the status of chief, although such a position did not exist amongst Africans. Chiefs were co-opted with special privileges and land. By the 1920’s a small group of mission-educated Kikuyu formed a political organization called the Kikuyu Central Association, KCA, to challenge colonial regulations. Johnstone Kenyatta was a member of this group. When the mission groups opposed the traditional Kikuyu practice of female circumcision, many Africans left the church to form their own schooling and church groups.

After the Second World War returning African soldiers, who had fought in the Middle East and India-Burma theatres of war, found an increasingly changed landscape. Large-scale mechanized farming no longer required squatters and reserves were over-crowded. As a result many settled in Nairobi where they could participate in the underground economy of hawking, beer brewing and prostitution. The KCA, forced underground as well, re-emerged in 1944 as the Kenya African Union, KAU. This political group realized that the traditional practice of oathing would mobilize fellow Kikuyu most effectively. “Typically, Kikuyu men had taken an oath to forge solidarity during times of war or internal crises; the oath would morally bind men together in the face of great challenges. But at Olenguruone the oath was transformed by the changing political circumstances of British colonialism, and local Kikuyu leaders administered it not only to men but to women and children as well. “ (p.25) By 1950, the scale of the oathing campaign could not be hidden from the colonial government, who saw it as an organized and unified force which soon acquired the name ‘Mau Mau’. In 1950 the colonial government used the declaration of a State of Emergency to begin, what they saw as ‘rooting out’ this new threat. The settlers and the colonial government saw the swearing of the oath as the ‘poison’ that had to be rooted out. The way to do this was to obtain a ‘confession’ from anyone they suspected of taking the oath. The Emergency permitted the government to evade the restrictions of the newly signed European Convention on Human Rights and opened the door to brutal methods of obtaining the desired confessions.

I witnessed a simple oath taking incident in a rural school when I was visiting in 2013. A teacher was teaching a lesson on the dangers of addiction (smoking, drugs, alcohol), a common enough lesson anywhere in the world. At the conclusion of the lesson he had all the students take an oath to not become addicted. The whole atmosphere was celebratory and upbeat with handshakes and clapping and everyone on their feet.

Elkins interviewed three hundred ex-detainees, collecting living evidence of the horrendous events that Africans, mainly Kikuyu, underwent during the Emergency. She describes the brutal ‘screening’ process used to exact information from Africans. Another chapter describes the phony ‘rehabilitation’ process that supposedly would win over the ‘hearts and minds’ of Africans, away from the influence of Mau Mau. The ‘Pipeline’ was how the British colonial masters implemented a sorting process into ‘white, grey, or black’ levels of commitment to Mau Mau. Africans were held in camps according to their colour/commitment and could be moved up or down the Pipeline. The Gulag, referencing the notorious Soviet Union system of civil persecution so well described by Solzynytshyn, was recreated in colonial Kenya as ‘villiagization’. Elkins fills her book with first-person accounts of survivors of the ‘screening’ and the Pipeline and ‘villiagization’.

At each stage of the Emergency the colonial powers tried to fight Mau Mau with torture and fear. Survivor’s stories of individual perpetrators, often, white settlers with brutal and sadistic routines, form an overwhelming testament to the horror of Britain’s colonial war. Often these individuals were members of the Kenya Police Reserve, giving them some form of official status to conduct their terror campaign. Astonishingly, what the survivors recall most, however, was not the physical terror but the lack of food, the hunger. The detention camps and ‘villages’ were uninhabitable yet housed thousands. Malnutrition, disease and death reigned everywhere.

When the Emergency ended in 1955, the colonial government had to find a way to ‘reabsorb’ the thousands detained in the Pipeline camp system. The ‘Swynnerton Plan’, developed in 1954, was designed as an agrarian reform effort that would consolidate land and increase production. In reality it meant giving land to Loyalist African farmers and keeping Mau Mau supporters landless as labourers. Something called the ‘Loyalty Certificate’ was used to divide the African population by citizen rights such as freedom of movement and voting rights. Schemes like this were designed to carry on the oppression of Africans but not serious enough to invoke charges under the European Convention on Human Rights. In Britain itself, the grand narrative of the ‘civilizing mission’ of Britain continued to be told in official circles and in the right-wing press.

The British government (Churchill was Prime Minister) and the colonial government, issued a general amnesty to Mau Mau and loyalist forces in 1955, thereby protecting the perpetrators of terror from prosecution. An effort to reform the corrupt Kenyan Police force failed when the London-appointed reformer, Colonel Young, was stonewalled by the colonial governor (Baring). The Labour Party in Britain pushed for more transparency regarding Kenya. Barbara Castle, an ordinary Labour MP, went to Kenya in 1955 and reported her findings. The British press followed the story with more ‘leaks’ despite the Official Secrets Act embargo being used to cover up the atrocities.

Elkins is clear when she charges that the Christian missionary movement in Kenya knew about the atrocities but chose to not put forward a real effort to stop them. Similarly, the British government knew what was going on and chose not to stop it (Churchill, Anthony Eden, and Harold Macmillan). “Decades had been spent constructing Britain’s imperial image, and that image contrasted sharply with the brutal behaviour of other European empires in Africa. King Leopold’s bloody rule in the Congo, the German-directed genocide of the Herero in South West Africa, and France’s disgrace in Algeria – the British reputedly avoided all of those excesses because, simply, it was British to do so.” (p.306)

I recall a history class at university in the 1970’s where the instructor made this exact same point, comparing the orderly withdrawal of Britain from its African colonies, to the disorderly withdrawal, particularly of France from its colonies in Africa.

By 1957, thirty thousand ‘hard core’ Mau Mau were still in detention. The colonial government decided it was time to ‘break them’. The European Convention on Human Rights could be ignored because of the Emergency but now something had to be done. The plan was to exact confessions of all but the political hard-core leadership, perhaps two thousand, who would then be kept in permanent detention. By 1959 the systematic beating and torture continued but one incident sparked a new response. The Hola Massacre of eleven detainees became the focal point of the deceit and the tipping point for the decision to withdraw colonial rule. It took until 1963 to complete the handing over of power to the new African government.
Here are some interesting links to more essays on this author and this subject:

http://www.theguardian.com/profile/ca...

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v27/n05/bernard-...

Histories of the Hanged: Britain’s Dirty War in Kenya and the End of Empire by David Anderson

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

A harrowing study of British concentration camps and repression in Kenya during the Mau Mau Uprising (the anniversary of the capture of Dedan Kimathi is at the time of writing). She exposes a systematic campaign of archival erasure which historians of the British (and other) colonial projects have come to know well. I cannot imagine how difficult her archival research was considering the general attitude of British archival staff to those critical of imperial history. There are several things Elkins was able to definitively prove: the Kenyan colonial administration constantly and consistently lied regarding its conduct, and that the official measure of 11,000 Kikuyu deaths during the 1952-1960 period is far, far too low. It is exceedingly difficult to take issue with Elkins's work in my usual fashion: brilliantly sourced and argued, the only arguments against her thesis come from a ridiculous brand of Eurocentric historians who cling to the defense of Empire as a reactionary rallying cry.

I have taken 1 star off only because, although frequent mentions of Mau Mau leadership and "intelligentsia" are often made, there is no section devoted to explaining the worldview or goals of the Mau Mau beyond the ejection of the British. I wonder, as well, whether Elkins's contentions that Kenyatta had always been the conservative he turned out to be as President is true. His connections with the left-wing of the Labour Party (although, of course, not radical) and left Pan-Africanists are well known.

[Kevin Isaac · Rating 5 out of 5]

Until the 2005 these events have remained untold, largely because the British government in Kenya destroyed most of its files. For the eight years Caroline Elkins with the help of Terry Wairimu (24 yrs then) has conducted exhaustive research to piece together the story, unearthing reams of documents arid interviewing several hundred Kikuyu survivors.

Britain’s Gulag reveals what happened inside Kenya’s detention camps, as well as the efforts to conceal the truth. Now, for the first time, unless you experienced it, we can understand the full savagery of the Mau Mau war and the ruthless determination with which Britain sought to control its empire.

An extraordinary selfless empathetic act of historical recovery that everyone should read and get appalled by, shed tears and then get even more angry at how it was almost erased. Yet we are recreating gulags all-over again and it breaks my feeble heart

[100 Books Yearly · Rating 3 out of 5]

The book documents the brutal history of the British colonial rule in Kenya, and the Mau Mau rebellion.
It provides a detailed account of the atrocities committed by both the colonial government and the Mau Mau rebels, including torture, rape, and killings.
Elkins argues that the British government was complicit in the crimes committed, and that the atrocities have been largely ignored or dismissed by the British government and public.

…Suspects were whipped, beaten, sodomized, burned, forced to eat feces and drink urine—all at the hands of the screening teams..

“When someone steals your ox, it is killed and roasted and eaten,” Koinange said. “One can forget. When someone steals your land, especially if nearby, one can never forget. It is always there, its trees which were dear friends, its little streams. It is a bitter presence.”

[Zulu Fox · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5 stars. A really great work of scholarly reporting on a topic that I've seldom heard about in discussions of colonialism: the Mau Mau Uprising and Britain's gulag "pipeline" in Kenya. This book does a great job of combining oral accounts and primary sources to present a picture of both why the gulag system came about in the British Kenya Colony, as well as how it quickly became a "pornography of terror." I especially loved the usage of primary sources to prove - often in their own words - that all of the key colonial officials were aware of what was going on (i.e. torture, summary executions, sexual violence, forced labour etc.) and in many cases were actively mandating these activities, even while they were publicly denying they were occurring.

Some fairly mind-blowing stuff detailed in this book includes: 1) that OPERATION ANVIL (a military operation) removed virtually all non-loyalist Kikuyu from Nairobi with no warning in 1954, 2) that nearly the entire non-loyalist Kikuyu population found itself either in the gulag pipeline or in newly-built enclosed villages, 3) that routine violence/torture against detainees became officially mandated British policy, 4) that official death count of 11,000 Kikuyu notwithstanding, between 100,000 and 300,000 Kikuyu may have died as a result of the British campaign against the Mau Mau and 5) the the right to practice FGM was a rallying cry for the Kikuyu against the British.

I only subtracted .5 of a start because I found it a little frustrating that the author seems to have assumed some knowledge of the Mau Mau movement on the part of the reader. While the author does a great job outlining the political-economic causes of the Kikuyu's dispossession and discontent, beyond saying that some 90% of Kikuyu took some form of Mau Mau oath, she dedicates only one sentence to defining what the term "Mau Mau" actually means ("a mass peasant movement"), but then at times uses language like "the Mau Mau people" "Mau Mau movement" "profaning the Mau Mau" etc. while at times taking pains to point out the the future Kenyan president Jomo Kenyatta was himself NOT a Mau Mau member - so all of this leaves me feeling like a little bit more time spent discussing, for example, what does the phrase "Mau Mau" actually mean? Was there an organized Mau Mau leadership? What were the Mau Mau fighters/members in the cities and forests actually up to while all of this was going on? would have been illuminating. In any case, a fairly small thing and outside the author's main focus.

As a footnote, interestingly for the reader of 2020, while the comparisons to Nazi concentration camps and the Soviet gulag archipelago are convincingly presented, a new comparison comes to mind: China's interment of Uyghurs in so-called "Vocational Education and Training Camps" - it will be interesting to one day read a definitive account of that period of Chinese history and consider how it measures against the aforementioned examples.

[Alex · Rating 4 out of 5]

Well researched and devastating account of Britain's policy to isolate people to suppress the Mau Mau rebellion, and how that policy led to a system of torture, extrajudicial murder, and human rights violations for those caught up - and the lack of any sanction against the perpetrators. Author relied on many eye witnesses and the little documentation that survived. My only wish would have been for a bit more discussion at the end about the eventual dismantling of the camps and the transition to Independence.

[Carole · Rating 5 out of 5]

This history is a very difficult read. Elkins undertook a dissertation on the detention camps in Kenya in the 1950's which were developed in response to the frightening Mau Mau movement. They were touted as a program to "civilize" the movement adherents. Elkins expected to write about the success of Britain's civilizing mission. Instead her research uncovered a destructive and abusive system of detention camps where violence was condoned and encouraged and British officials covered up the abuse. The extent of the callous brutality had not been previously exposed. Details of the devilish torture and murder of members of the Kikuyu tribe are recounted through meticulous research and especially the stories of survivors. Rather than shouldering the "white man's burden" to uplift their colonial subjects, the British are revealed as venal and brutal destroyers of the indigenous people they ruled. Elkins links British colonial policies, especially unrestricted land grabs, to the rise of Mau Mau adherents. It is difficult to read the grisly descriptions of shocking and terrorizing abuse. Almost as painful is the denial and coverup by high level British officials. It is an important book in understanding the impact of colonial policies.

[Susan Feyrer · Rating 4 out of 5]

Amazing research completed on a topic I knew nothing about. It was very depressing book about man's inhumanity to man. Four stars instead of 5 because the author used a great deal of unnnecessary repetition to make her point.