Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain's Gulag in Kenya (review)

This is an important book. Although the story of the Mau Mau camps has been told before in brief compass, Caroline Elkins has written the first full study, and her thoroughness and skill suggest that Imperial Reckoning may be the definitive work on Britain's colonial gulag.

Its influence will extend beyond the scholarly community. In 2002 Mwai Kibaki (a Kikuyu from the Mau Mau center of Nyeri) and an opposition coalition took over the government of Kenya from strong-man Daniel Arap Moi and his KANU party. This marked both a political watershed and an end to official amnesia about Kenya's past. The new government established commissions to investigate colonial and postindependence human rights abuses, and officially recognized the Mau Mau War Veterans Association, a group chaired by Vice-President Moody Awori. An activist historian, Elkins has had a part in these developments. In 2002, she was consultant to a BBC exposé of British repression in Kenya, and this spring Vice-President Awori spoke at the launch of Imperial Reckoning's Kenya edition in Nairobi.

The Kenya Emergency ran from 1952 to 1960. Mau Mau, dominated by the large Kikuyu ethnic group, was an oath-bound organization of peasants rebelling "for land and freedom." Though poorly-armed, the guerrilla forest fighters were "masters of bushcraft" (in General George Erskine's estimation), and gave the British regulars, Kenya Regiment (a settler unit), King's African Rifles, Kenya Police, and Kikuyu Home Guards a serious fight.

Borrowing from General Gerald Templer's Malayan counter-insurgency, General Erskine, backed by Governor Evelyn Baring, focused on cutting off the guerrillas from popular support. Fortified "Emergency villages," an enormous ditch along the forest perimeter, great "sweeps" of suspects, and the detention of thousands of Kikuyu men were all part of Erskine's strategy. The scale of the camp system was huge. Elkins argues that previous estimates of 80,000 detainees are too low. Using techniques similar to those Anne Applebaum employed in Gulag (2003), a study of the Soviet camps, Elkins estimates that the British detained between 160,000 and 320,000 Africans in more than 100 camps.

Elkins's account makes harrowing reading. She uses archival evidence well, but her study depends primarily on dozens of interviews with ex-detainees and their families. Collectively, these testimonies comprise a damning indictment of British repression.

Elkins demolishes the idea that an important British goal was "rehabilitation," and allows her informants to describe, in excruciating detail, the degradations and tortures guards and warders inflicted on them. Mau Mau atrocities pale in nature and scope. Elkins's comparisons of this British gulag to the Nazi and Soviet camps is generally persuasive, though she makes too much of an "eliminationist" analysis modeled on that of Daniel Goldhagen.

Imperial Reckoning blows the cobwebs of British and Kenyan official amnesia to shreds. Moreover, the book provides ammunition to the Mau Mau War Veterans Association for their lawsuit against the British government. I can think of no more convincing demonstration of the power and relevance of history.