Britain's Gulag: The Brutal End of Empire in Kenya. Caroline Elkins

This magnificent book shows how the Brits, using methods of immense savagery, broke the Mau Mau terrorist movement in the 1950s, only to lose the entire colony of Kenya partly in response to the brutishness of their own counterterrorism. Even though the author is an academic, and doesn't write with the verve and polish of a William Manchester, this book is gripping reading. Elkins lets the facts tell the story, and she certainly has the facts. She seems to have read every relevant document and talked with practically everybody still living who participated in the Kenyan gulag as either a victim or a perpetrator. In her acknowledgements she notes that she learned both Kiswahil and the rudiments of Kikuyu to help her with her interviews (she also had an African translator). Indeed, her book would have been impossible without the Africans' contributions. One of the other reviewers here complains that Elkins didn't read Robert Ruark's pro-settler "Something of Value" or "Uhuru." But Ruark, an American who probably didn't talk to any Africans in Kenya except his askaris and houseboys, was a naive sucker for the settlers' racist world view. Far more tough-minded than Ruark, Elkins talked to plenty of settlers as well as Africans. The sheer accretion of facts and anecdotes, with almost every sentence footnoted, makes for an overwhelmingly persuasive case. It is a horrific story of a system that Stalin outdid in duration and magnitude, but not in relative cruelty. Pound for pound the Brits' imprisonment of the Kikuyus, rife as it was with mutilating torture, random executions, systematic rape, enforced relocations and treachery, and massacres, was about as brutal as it gets. And we owe it to Elkins for bringing these facts, only occasionally referenced in journalism and earlier history books, fully into the light. This is a groundbreaking, iconoclastic work that sheds a new, highly unflattering light on British imperialism. It's tough to think of Manchester's hero biographee, Churchill, in quite the same way.

Elkins(E)has written an excellent book detailing how the English colonial rulers in Kenya imposed a totalitarian military dictatorship upon the dominant Kikuyu tribe in Kenya when ,initially,a small portion of the tribe rebelled(the Mau Mau revolt)against the theft of much of their prime farm land by the 40,000 white colonial settlers.The revolt started in 1952.Sir Evelyn Baring,the governor of Kenya, panicked when a white settler was killed in late 1952 and declared a state of emergency.The use ,by the English military forces,of totalitarian techniques, like concentration camps,torture,dismemberment, and summary executions ,spread the revolt to the majority of the Kikuyu tribe.A civil war erupted that the English and their Kiyuku allies finally won in 1960.A total of 32 white settlers lost their lives compared to 100,000 Kiyukus.The English campaign of military terror,while "successful",led public opinion in England to repudiate the legitimacy of the settler claims to be a civilizing force fighting the "evil" Mau Mau.Elkins shows that the Prime Minister of England and many members of Parliament were aware of the totalitarian techniques that were being applied in Kenya and did nothing about it.Kenya was abandoned as a English colony and given its independence in 1963.Unfortunately,the English military,totalitarian dictatorship was replaced by a corrupt authoritarian dictatorship dominated by Jomo Kenyatta and his corrupt family and kin group.

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."

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.

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.