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

https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.cgi?path=34341151420457

 Caroline Elkins. Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain's Gulag in
Kenya. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2005. 496 pp. Index. $27.50
(cloth), ISBN 978-0-8050-7653-0.
**
*Reviewed by:* Fikru Gebrekidan, Department of History, St. Thomas
University Fredericton, Canada.
**
*Published by:* H-Africa <https://www.h-net.org/~africa/> (April, 2006)

Inside the Empire's Closet: Skeletons of War Crime, Mayhem and Murder

Caroline Elkins's Imperial Reckoning is a study of the British response to
the Mau Mau insurrection in Kenya in the 1950s. While the history of the Mau
Mau or, more correctly, Land and Freedom Army, has engaged the attention of
some scholars, the subject has not aroused popular interest in the same way
the independent struggles in Portuguese and French empires have. It is as if
British imperial scholarship, which at one point dominated colonial
historiography, wanted to retain a sanitized version of the empire's
disintegration. After all, India, the jewel of the British empire, gained
independence nonviolently, while minor players such as the Gold Coast were
granted freedom on a silver platter. Elkins's study of the Mau Mau and the
British response to it puts to rest such sanitized interpretations of the
fall of the largest seaborne empire in human history.

As a colony Kenya provided all the lures of a tropical fairyland: fertile
highlands free of malaria, blue skies year round, exotic wild life,
picturesque landscape and all that within a day's drive from the coast.
Unlike the typical working-class overseas immigrants, whose rationale for
leaving Europe included the privilege that whiteness afforded in the
colonies, Kenyan settlers either boasted a genuine aristocratic pedigree or
at least affected some Oxfordian pretensions. By the time the Mau Mau
uprising began in 1952, Kenya had become home to about 50,000
well-entrenched Europeans, notorious for their fanatic race outlook as much
as for their claim to blue blood.

The relationship between the white settlers and the local African farmers
during this period can be best characterized as that of a zero sum game. In
just over a generation, the latter had witnessed their population reduced to
a society of squatters or altogether pushed into "tribal" reserves. They had
lost their political freedom and become a servile class, not to mention a
sense of social alienation the elders must have felt as their children
joined mission schools by the droves. Their men who fought against the
Japanese in Burma, and against Nazism and Fascism in Europe and Africa, had
returned home not as war heroes but as potential troublemakers that required
constant government vigilance.

While postwar political developments at home can be described as more of the
same, few of the politically conscious Kenyans could ignore the "winds of
change" blowing elsewhere. Indonesia and India had gained independence by
the late forties, followed by the overthrow of the pro-British Egyptian
monarchy some years later. By the early 1950s, in short, Kenya like most
other colonies was ready for some political tremor. What few foresaw was,
nevertheless, the level of violence to which Britain would resort in trying
to contain this nationalist stir.

The exact circumstances leading to the Kikuyu anticolonial insurgency remain
a mystery. Initiation rites such as the partaking in animal sacrifice and
the swearing of a series of oaths gave the Mau Mau its secretive and almost
religious aura. Members called themselves the Land and Freedom Army, but the
British referred to them as Mau Mau, a derogatory term of unknown origin.
Guerilla-style military operations, aimed mostly at settlers in isolated
farmsteads, began in early 1952. Then came the turning point late that year.
On October 21, following the assassination of a well-known loyalist chief,
Governor Evelyn Baring declared a state of emergency. Immediate victims of
the crackdown included the overseas-educated Jomo Kenyatta and a few more
Kikuyu notables, whom Baring locked up for several years in the desert
district of Lokitaung.

As subsequent investigations would reveal, the conservative Kenyatta had
little to do with the underground resistance. The Land and Freedom Army had
in fact been made up of loosely organized bands of peasant fighters with a
sprinkle of World War II veterans here and there. Baring would provide the
forest fighters their rallying figure, thanks to the trumped up charges that
turned Kenyatta into a nationalist super hero.

By 1953 the colony had mobilized fully its resources to contain the
insurgency. The well-publicized disproportionate use of military force,
including aerial bombardment, constituted only one half of the story behind
the British war in East Africa. The unconventional other half, little known
in the outside world and now remembered by even fewer Kenyans, is the
subject of Elkins's study. Unconventional anti-insurgency tactics included
summary executions; electric shock; mass killings; mass deportations; slave
labor; the burning down of villages and similar collective punishments;
starvation; threatening harm to wives and children; sodomization and rape;
and soaking prisoners with human waste. When the emergency ended seven years
later, African death due to such acts of cruelty ran perhaps as high as
300,000, almost thirty times the mainstream figure of 11,000 (p. 366). By
contrast, insurgents had killed about eighteen hundred loyalists as well as
thirty-two settlers.

Albeit on a much more minor scale, the British reign of terror in Kenya
almost paralleled Nazi racial atrocities. Moreover, it happened in just less
than a decade since World War II, as the West was still coming to grips with
the horrors of the Jewish Holocaust. Unlike the gas chambers, however, the
world would know little of the Kenyan concentration camps even half a
century after the fact. This collective amnesia is the background against
which Elkins establishes London's colonial excesses, thereby deconstructing
the Pax Britannica image.

Basing her argument on various sources of evidence, from recently
declassified archival materials to oral interviews with ex-colonial
officials and Mau Mau survivors, Elkins challenges the conventional
interpretation of the British response to Mau Mau as measured and within the
realm of "civilized" behavior. "I've come to believe that during the Mau Mau
war British forces wielded their authority with a savagery that betrayed a
perverse colonial logic," the Harvard professor writes, adding: "I now
believe there was in late colonial Kenya a murderous campaign to eliminate
Kikuyu people, a campaign that left tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of
thousands, dead" (pp. xv-xvi).

Anecdotal examples lend credence to Elkins's argument that the British
engaged in more than a mere anti-insurgency operation. A settler in the Rift
Valley province, remembered by the locals as Joseph Mengele, ran his own
interrogation camp where suspects were castrated and forced to eat their
testicles, or burned alive (p. 67). Another notorious group, popularly known
as the Kenya's SS and made up of mostly South African police, was in charge
of the Mbakasi labor camp, now the site of the Kenyatta International
Airport, where tortures and murders happened regularly behind closed doors
(p. 86). Sadists and race fanatics in fact seemed to have found a common
ground in the anti-Mau Mau operation. One American, who volunteered his
service as interrogator, boasted of his preference for the knife so as to
inflict a slow and painful death in full view of other suspects. Another
British officer remembered how he and two other white colleagues stood and
grinned as their Alsatian reduced a healthy prisoner into a heap of blood
and scattered flesh in a matter of minutes (pp. 85-86).

Of course, there is no such a thing as a clean war. But the collaborative
accounts by over a hundred informants, whom Elkins interviews in person,
demonstrate that such gruesome mayhems and racist orgies remained the rule,
not the exception in screening centers and detention camps across Kikuyuland
in the 1950s.

The campaign for "hearts and minds," as the officials ironically dubbed the
anti- insurgency war, focused on the detention camps or the pipeline. From
1954 on, the camps hosted about 80,000 detainees at any given time, which
means hundreds of thousands of men must have been rotated through them by
1960. The pipeline began in cities or villages where thousands would be
rounded up randomly and put on packed trains and buses for undisclosed
destinations. Once in the remote holding centers, the ordeal of detention
life would start, accompanied by hard labor and punctuated by a series of
interrogation or screening tortures. Those who confessed or "spat back the
oath" would be sent to rehabilitation centers, while hardcore Mau Mau
adherents were transferred to special camps where back-breaking labor and
tortures of all sorts claimed many more lives.

Women, while a small fraction of detainees, made up an important component.
Over four thousand women went through the pipeline each year. About 15
percent of them were interned with their young ones while many others gave
birth in detention (p. 227). In general, men ran the female holding centers
with all the consequences it entailed. In one instance, however, an
eccentric female settler, the notorious Katherine Warren Gash, reigned over
the screening process with as much terror as any of her male counterparts
(p. 222).

The frequent accusations against women dealt with taking the oath or passing
information to the forest fighters. The range of tortures they suffered,
from the insertion of foreign objects in their vaginas to having their
breasts cut off by pliers, was proof that the interrogators made little
distinction between actual combatants and those with supporting roles. In
fact, given the presence of children in the detention camps, the
psychological trauma faced by female detainees was much worse than that
suffered by husbands and brothers.

Where Elkins's study is equally at its best in reconstructing the gender
dimension of British war crime in Kenya is in her discussion of the forced
villagization. About 1.5 million Kikuyus, almost the entire population, were
resettled in 804 villages. Barbed wires and spiked trenches surrounded the
villages so as to strangulate the fighters in their forest hideouts by
denying them access to civilians. Since a large number of men were already
in detention camps, villagization affected mostly women, children, the old
and the disabled. Evictions, which often began with the burning down of
villages, took place with no advance warning, with many dying in the process
and others barely making it out alive. In the makeshift villages the
excesses from the detention camps were reenacted: rape, forced labor,
torture, diseases, and famine. Villagization would succeed in severing the
fighters' lifeline, but at the cost of tens of thousands of civilians,
mostly women and children (p. 234).

Although Elkins's central theme is British war crime in Kenya, she also
addresses the topic of African agency, especially the ingenuity with which
detainees responded to camp life. While no doubt many succumbed to tortures
and the incessant psychological warfare, others devised various techniques
of resistance: from engaging in discreet letter writing campaigns to using
the prison ground for the recruitment of new Mau Mau converts. Complementing
detainee resistance from within was the overseas lobby by a small but vocal
group of Labour MPs such as Barbara Castle and Fenner Brockway. However,
just as the home guards got in the way of detainee resistance, so did the
stonewalling of the Colonial Office and the British government against such
voices of conscience.

A groundbreaking contribution to colonial historiography, Imperial
Reckoningis a timely publication in light of the recent scandals at
Abu Ghraib and
Guantanamo. Methodological questions may be raised about Elkins's liberality
with figures as well as the authenticity of individual testimonies that make
up the bulk of her sources on torture and detention. But one has only to
remember the German genocide in Southwest Africa, the death of millions in
Leopold's Congo, or the Italian use of chemical weapons in Ethiopia, to know
that the onus of disproof for such data lies on defendants of empire.

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