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Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of…
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Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain's Gulag in Kenya (original: 2005; edição: 2005)

de Caroline Elkins (Autor)

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Thousands of Kenyans fought alongside the British in World War II, but just a few years after the defeat of Hitler, the British colonial government detained nearly the entire population of Kenya's largest ethnic minority, the Kikuyu--some one and a half million people. The story of the system of prisons and work camps where thousands met their deaths has remained largely untold, because of a determined effort by the British to destroy all official records of their attempts to stop the Mau Mau uprising, the Kikuyu people's ultimately successful bid for Kenyan independence--Publisher.… (mais)
Membro:ASHyderabad
Título:Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain's Gulag in Kenya
Autores:Caroline Elkins (Autor)
Informação:Holt Paperbacks (2005), Edition: Reprint, 496 pages
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Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain's Gulag in Kenya de Caroline Elkins (2005)

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BRUTALITY, THE BRITISH WAY

Histories of the Hanged by David Anderson & Britain’s Gulag by Caroline Elkins

On 20 October 1952 a state of emergency was declared in Britain’s East African colony of Kenya. It lasted until 1960, and was the most brutal campaign in Britain’s attempt to hold on to its empire after the Second World War. The rebellion was crushed and it is significant that, while the rebels called themselves the Land and Freedom Army, they are remembered as the Mau Mau, the bastardised name given to them by the settlers.

Some 32 white civilians, 63 white military and 527 ‘loyalists’ were killed. In contrast, 11,503 Africans died according to the government (the real toll was probably closer to 30,000). The figure doesn’t include over 1,000 rebels who were hanged. Two new books look at the rebellion from very different angles. David Anderson’s Histories of the Hanged examines the emergency through imperial court transcripts, concentrating on those the British executed. It grasps the major issues and generally condemns the imperialists through their own reports. However, it tends to accept reports on their own terms, including the notorious British government whitewash, the Corfield report. On the other hand Caroline Elkins’s Britain’s Gulag is largely based on interviews with African survivors, and provides an invaluable testament to the real horror of what occurred, though she has a less solid grasp of the background.

British conquest of the colony started in the 1890s. By 1908, Winston Churchill, not usually squeamish, commented, ‘It looks like butchery… Surely it cannot be necessary to go on killing these defenceless people on such an enormous scale.’ Having subdued Kenya, the British preferred to rule indirectly. Since the local people had no chiefs, the British appointed their own. Many of these became very wealthy by appropriating land in the ‘African reserves’.

Meanwhile the British took the best arable land – what became known as the White Highlands. The Kikuyu people were most affected by this as they had lived in the Highlands. Africans returning from the Second World War found that their situation had not improved, but was actually deteriorating. The Kenya government planned to encourage white ex-soldiers to immigrate by offering good farming land, while demobbed Africans could find neither land nor work.

It was not unusual for urban militants to be members of both trade unions and street gangs. Those who went on to establish the Mau Mau rebellion were both active trade unionists and members of one of the main gangs operating in the capital, Nairobi. From the late 1940s these radicals moved their activities into the Kenya African Union (KAU), a constitutional nationalist organisation. Operating covertly within KAU branches, they started administering oaths of resistance to colonialism. Loyalists and black police were killed. As the rebellion developed several white settlers were also slain.

The state of emergency was declared and Operation Jock Scott successfully detained all the African nationalist leadership, conservative and radical alike. It both beheaded the movement and caused the larger rebellion to start at least a year before the leadership had intended. Leadership of the Mau Mau had moved down a rung and the rebels were far from prepared, but they remained disciplined and set about establishing guerrilla forces.

Groups of up to 4,000 rebels set up bases in the deep forests around Mount Kenya. Ironically, organisation in the forest camps was based on the structures of the British army. They mounted increasingly audacious raids. The army and airforce were unable to dislodge them, particularly as they enjoyed popular support among the rural population.

To counter this the entire 1.5 million rural Kikuyu population were forcibly resettled into barbed-wire fenced villages, overseen by watch-towers. Continuing urban insurgency was smashed by the aptly named Operation Anvil in April 1954, which effectively arrested all Kikuyu in Nairobi. It also led to an upsurge in detention without trial.

The settlers could not conceive that Africans had legitimate grievances. They believed that the only thing that could make the previously passive workforce rise up was the taking of primitive oaths. A system of detention camps was established. Theoretically, detainees would move down a ‘pipeline’ from one camp to the next as they became cleansed of the Mau Mau disease. They would confess through a mixture of coercion and education. In practice this meant forced labour, torture and near starvation. At least 80,000 passed through the ‘pipeline’.

Outside Nairobi conflict had developed between the loyalist Home Guard and the Mau Mau. Class drove this civil war. Chiefs and loyalists owned the best land in the overcrowded reserves. Mau Mau support came from the poor, the landless and the ex-‘squatters’, being pushed out of the vast white farms. Detention, villagisation and Operation Anvil combined to break the back of the movement by 1956.

Despite this the Mau Mau should be claimed as an important anti-imperialist struggle. Britain won the war, but would be wary of risking the costs of another insurgency elsewhere.

Ken Olende, Socialist Review 295, April 2005
https://socialistworker.co.uk/socialist-review-archive/history-imperialism-bruta... ( )
  KenOlende | Feb 5, 2024 |
Along with David Anderson's Histories of the Hanged, a well-researched expose of the brutality of British response to Mau Mau. ( )
  kaitanya64 | Jan 3, 2017 |
Well written, highly researched but brutal in its honesty. Yet another history of European's assumption of power and intelligence of Africans.
A slow but thorough book. When I got the candid part of torturing of natives, I said to myself. Enough.
A necessary book to remind ourselves of the callousness of the human race. ( )
1 vote busterrll | Aug 31, 2016 |
This is an important book, but a gut-churning one. If you've frothed at the sicko propaganda spewed by Simon Winchester, Jan Morris, John Keays, anything published by John Murray, and the international tourism industry, it's a great, sobering antidote, but you must have a strong stomach.

I'm in Asia and so have known many Hong Kong Chinese, Malaysians, Burmese and South Asians over the years. Let's not leave out the Irish either. Their world-weary reflex if I told them of this book (or a British-made colonial-yhemed movie) would be--it always is--"You think *that's* bad, you should see what the British did to us/how we're depicted by the British."

I got a similar response when I first heard of this book and mentioned it to an American friend whose anthropologist father was doing research in Kenya in this period: "But everybody knows this!" Then he ran off the figures of the number of people killed by the Mau Mau (30-something? Less than 100) and the typical imperial response of massacring many, many more. And of course the virtually instantaneous evacuation of Nairobi and the history of land expropriation would be well known to people like his father. (Not to mention Obama, as noted in Dreams of My Father.)

But, folks, for the 20th century this is a new level of British racism and violence. Yes, the Brits castrated Indian nationalists. Summary trials and executions were rife wherever there was rebellion (consider the Malaya civil war taking place at the same time). OK, the mass movements of 500,000 people in Malaysia--where entire mountain villages would be given hours' notice to be moved to the lowlands into guarded "villages" for years on end--beat the Kenyan experience (where 3/4 of Nairobi's population, all the Kikuyu, was cleaned out in a day) but the extent of brutality and how long it went on, I suspect is unrivaled.

(Oh, btw, when I was reading this, I talked to two Malaysians who have made a couple of films about the army of the Communist Party of Malaya. Looking through this book, they said that the degree of violence was probably lower in Malaya at the time--unless you count the "banishment" of 50,000 Chinese to newly communist China. But they picked up on the pix of Kenyan informers with bags over their bodies, merely nodding as suspects were marched by them. A single nod and the poor suspect--perhaps a personal enemy, perhaps a stranger--was often destined for years of hell. They said that was done in Malayan states at the time too. [With that world-weary look: doesn't everyone know that?] Tying people with barbed wire and then dragging them behind vehicles until their limbs pulled off, however, was a French specialty in Asia. )

Then you have the concentration camps themselves. Worse in the way than the Brits' beloved Nazi camps because the tortures continued to get alleged Mau Mau (often not genuine Mau Mau, of course) to renounce and then to get out of the "pipeline," they had to inflict tortures on others. Among them was Kenyatta's son.

I want to caution readers, especially female ones, about the chapter on the home front, back in the villages and small towns. I suppose I was hoping for a little relief after the camp documentation. Well, brace yourself: rampant rape and rapes that you may not have imagined before. Not only with bottles but chili peppers in the vagina. Any woman can imagine all these years later how difficult it would be for the victims to talk about this. Not surprising that the author and her chief assistant/translator are women. (Of course they have to pile on this detail: it's the repetition of so many atrocities, the similarity of methods and memories, that makes the book credible ... but phew.)

I'm thinking of one woman's story: she was among a group of women from her village who were taken to a ditch to be shot, but she was saved because one of the killers found her good-looking. I don't have to tell you what ensued: maybe it would be better to be dead?

The nearby forests, where male relatives and neighbors often hid, were also free-range shooting galleries for the white settlers. It's eerie living so close to Cambodia, as I do, especially with a Khmer Rouge trial going on. Sometimes the interviewers in Imperial Reckoning are told of a massacre and the source will point, say, to a row of shops and say "there are piles of skeletons under there." Now, that's true of so many places in Cambodia, so many wars, so many massacres. I'm sure Cambodians wonder, "Why are the Khmer Rouge ones or this particular KR one singled out for excavation?" Why are the Kenyan graves not an international or British or Kenyan concern today?

We can guess some of the answer from the book's sad summary of post-independence history. Despite being imprisoned in a remote desert location, Kenyatta was a Christian and was never able to acknowledge the role of the Mau Mau in the independence fight. Incredibly, the white "settlers" were not all expelled or eased out. Well, some were bought out, but the buyers, winners, tended to be black Kenyans who had collaborated with them.

Reading this I often wondered if an African-American movie star or director might set a movie in Kenya and bring international public focus to apartheid in Kenya and Kenya's independence fight. (There's been enough about South Africa, right?) Obama's autobiographical work hasn't been enough to do that, though he's obviously knows what went down. Unfortunately, there's no happy ending, no triumphant life to exemplify the struggle like Mandela's. ( )
2 vote Periodista | Aug 31, 2010 |
The Dark Side of Empire

The British have up until recently been very proud of their imperial achievements. The only problem was that empire-building involved a certain amount of heavy-handed tactics, and like other imperialists like King Leopold, the French, and the Germans knew that sacrifices needed to be made for their "civilizing mission."

Like France's "dirty war" in French Algeria, or the British Malay, or the Belgian Congo, the British war against the Mau Mau movement turned savage very quickly. Many of the details that Elkins describe are too shocking to repeat, suffice to say that thousands, possibly hundreds of thousands, suffered horrible deaths.

Overall, an important, if sordid, look into another regrettable chapter of British imperial historiography. ( )
1 vote bruchu | Sep 13, 2009 |
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Elkins's prosecutorial zeal in a sense precludes a true ''imperial reckoning.'' For British rule brought crucial benefits that persist -- among them modern education and a degree of infrastructure -- as well as violent oppression to its subjects. A thorough reckoning would provide, by way of paradox, not only a more deeply insightful but a more deeply wrenching work of imperial history.
 
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Thousands of Kenyans fought alongside the British in World War II, but just a few years after the defeat of Hitler, the British colonial government detained nearly the entire population of Kenya's largest ethnic minority, the Kikuyu--some one and a half million people. The story of the system of prisons and work camps where thousands met their deaths has remained largely untold, because of a determined effort by the British to destroy all official records of their attempts to stop the Mau Mau uprising, the Kikuyu people's ultimately successful bid for Kenyan independence--Publisher.

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