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Like new. Paperback.

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• Amazon Sales Rank: #120956 in Books
• Published on: 2005-12-27
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 496 pages

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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.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The New Yorker
When the British left Kenya in 1963, they built bonfires and burned the meticulous records they kept. Most of these dealt with a period known as "the Emergency," when the colonial government attempted to stamp out the Mau Mau movement—an inchoate drive for "land and freedom," notorious for its machete killings—that arose among the Kikuyu, a hill-dwelling farming tribe and Kenya's largest ethnic group. Elkins, working in archives and traveling throughout Kenya, has undertaken an extraordinary act of historical recovery, to find out what the burned documents would have told us: the British, in their "civilizing mission" to pacify the colony, created a cruel system of detention centers, where interrogations often ended in death. With the moral fervor (and, occasionally, the overreachings) of a prosecutor, Elkins provides potent evidence of how a society warped by racism can descend into an almost casual inhumanity.
Copyright © 2005 The New Yorker

Customer Reviews

Forgotten History
Ms. Elkins does a good job of writing the story of the Mau-Mau rebellion, which was as she puts it a "decolonization war" in Kenya. Largely forgotten today (not least because it was rapidly overshadowed by events in the Congo, Nigeria and Rhodesia) events in Kenya proved to be an extreme challenge to Britain's post-war efforts to retain security in its extensive overseas possessions.

One piece of the puzzle which is largely ignored today is the success the British had in squelching the Mau-Mau. As deplorable as Ms. Elkins found their methods, the British were able to secure the colony against an insurgency. So much for insurgencies always being successful.

No One With Half a Brain Ever Expected the British to Admit Anything They Did was Bad or Evil
The British built an Empire that the world will never see the equal to. On the other hand they did it by exploiting the people and natural resources of more countries than anyone. They only missed out on the US because we wanted to exploit the land (and were better prepare to steal it from the 'Natives') more then did the British.

Though the British Empire eliminated slavery at the beginning of the nineteenth century, they learned how to exploit the 'natives' without having to give them lifetime employment. They also learned how to conquer a nation as they did to the Boers in South Africa.

Except for the beatings and such (yes I know, excuse me) the techniques used in Kenya were very similar to what the British did in South Africa at the beginning of the 20th century. They rounded up all the people who could possibly do anything to assist or feed the 'insurgents', put them in "protective villages" and left them there protected by 'loyalist militia' and surrounded by barbed-wire to die of disease and starvation.

The Kikuyu Loyalists, were as bad or worse than the Vichy Milice, and/or the Eastern European Latvians, Ukrainians, Lithuanians, Poles...etc, who collaborated with the German Army and Sondercommandos during WW2. The only country that truly punished their collaborators after the war was the Soviet Union, but they already had their system (Gulag) in place before the war. There were just too many 'helpers' to purge and in many cases they were in charge after the war.

As the Americans learned to use the 'lesser' Nazis after WW2, to rebuild Germany and protect it from Communism; Kenyatta used them to keep himself in power after independence. These Loyalist knew how to keep the opposition quiet, even if it meant 'planting' them in the ground.

Stalin is purported to have said, "the death of one man is a tragedy, the death of a million is a statistic". That's the way those in the war against the Mau Mau (which killed less than 100 white settlers) were able to get away with what they did.

Oh yeah, it's the same reason that those killed in Darfur will never see justice for what was done to them. Or Rwanda, or Cambodia or or or...

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