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Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain's Gulag in Kenya | 
 enlarge | Author: Caroline Elkins
Publisher: Owl Books
Category: Book
List Price: $17.00
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Rating:  24 reviews
Sales Rank: 71956
Media: Paperback
Pages: 496
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.4
Dimensions (in): 8.9 x 5.7 x 1.2
ISBN: 0805080015
Dewey Decimal Number: 967.6203
EAN: 9780805080018
ASIN: 0805080015
Publication Date: December 27, 2005
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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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
Product Description
Like new. Paperback.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 19 more reviews...
 Fascinating History, Slightly Turgid Writing February 8, 2005
Todd and In Charge (Miami, FL)
66 out of 78 found this review helpful
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.
 Excellent study of imperialism in action May 4, 2005
William Podmore (London United Kingdom)
50 out of 62 found this review helpful
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.
Underreported History February 14, 2005
AK van Deelen (The Hague, The Netherlands)
39 out of 46 found this review helpful
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.
An evil book for an evil purpose? February 6, 2005
Hugo S. Cunningham
27 out of 57 found this review helpful
Prof. Elkins defends the Mau Mau terrorist insurgency (1952-1960) against the British in Kenya, and condemns the British for suppressing it. By implication, she condemns independent Kenya's first President, Jomo Kenyatta, for turning his back on the insurgency and promoting interracial harmony.
Prof. Elkins raises legitimate points in support of Mau Mau, but tends to carry them too far.
She caricatures a supposed attitude that the British were angels, ignoring the real attitude (shared by Jomo Kenyatta and the British) that neither side was without sin, and that the best choice for Kenya was to bury the past. (As a result of Kenyatta's statesmanship, Kenya would be the most prosperous country in that part of Africa.)
Prof. Elkins repeatedly likens the British suppression of Mau Mau to the Nazi extermination of the Jews. She overlooks the fact that, if Jews had been going around slaughtering German families in their homes, the World would have found Hitler's antisemitism understandable. Even then, however, the World, while accepting internment, would not have condoned extermination. (Earth to Prof. Elkins: the British did not exterminate the Kikuyu tribe, host of Mau Mau.)
Prof. Elkins is not entirely honest with her readers. For example, she condemns British suppression of "nationalists in Malaya ... [who] were demanding their independence." She omits mentioning that the supposed "nationalists" were Communists drawn exclusively from Malaya's ethnic Chinese minority, rejected by the ethnic Malay majority.
Prof. Elkins makes incomplete analogies. She likens British "hearts and minds" rehabilitation of Mau Mau internees to widely-condemned Chinese "brainwashing" of US PoWs in the Korean War. That is true as far as it goes, but omits perspective at the other end of the spectrum: many societies subject common criminals to such "brainwashing" without controversy. Insurgent rebels (at least those who use terrorist tactics) logically fall somewhere between PoWs, protected by well-established international law, and common criminals.
Prof. Elkins tries to stir hatred of the ethnic British settlers with lurid allegations of sexual libertinism.
Prof. Elkins's agenda appears to be two-fold:
(1) to make it illegitimate to resist insurgency--
She blames Britain not only for the 11,000 deaths the British acknowledge, but also for a shortfall of 130,000 to 300,000 in the census of Kikuyu. Quite likely 8 years of insurgent war, destroying as it does the distinction between civilians and soldiers, and its resultant poverty, could slow down Kikuyu population growth by that much, but was it entirely the fault of the British? Leftists tend to blame all the losses from insurgent war on the government if the government is pro-Western, but on the insurgents if the government is anti-Western (eg. Sandinista Nicaragua).
(2) To revive Mau Mau hatreds and evict the remaining ethnic whites, as Robert Mugabe has been doing in Zimbabwe.--
But destroying one of the most productive sectors of Kenya's economy would not alleviate Kikuyu land hunger for more than a few years of population growth.
Spoken for the Voiceless November 12, 2005
king'ori (minnesota, US)
22 out of 29 found this review helpful
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."
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