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

Rating:
Summary: Fascinating History, Slightly Turgid Writing
Review: First off, let me congratulate the author, an assistant professor at Harvard, for her solid research and documentation regarding a very specific period in Britain's colonial experience (and of course Kenya's history): the post-WWII Mau Mau rebellion, leading to Kenyatta's ascendency as leader of a free Kenya. Unfortunately, her writing skills are not on par with her research abilities, and the book often feels like an extended graduate paper, badly in need of expert revision and editing. The writing style is slightly stale and turgid, so even exciting events are flattened and reduced to yet another episode of graduate study documentation.

Also, while I am for the most part in agreement with the views of the author and no fan of the British empire or its impact on colonial cultures, I must say Ms. Elkins is a bit over-the-top in her defense of the Mau Mau rebels and her indictment of their British overlords. It's rare in 2005 to see an author boldly defending the local African custom of female genital circumcision, or the blood oaths of the Mau Mau which required taking a life and ingesting parts of the human sacrifice.

On the whole, the book is an impressive first effort and a solid example of graduate-level research. I believe a more textured, nuanced approach to this material can be written, building on the first-hand accounts that Ms. Elkins has so comprehensively collected.

Rating:
Summary: Underreported History
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: An evil book for an evil purpose?
Review: Prof. Elkins defends the Mau Mau terrorist insurgency (1952-1960) against the British in Kenya, and condemns the British for suppressing it. By implication, she condemns independent Kenya's first President, Jomo Kenyatta, for turning his back on the insurgency and promoting interracial harmony.

Prof. Elkins raises legitimate points in support of Mau Mau, but tends to carry them too far.

She caricatures a supposed attitude that the British were angels, ignoring the real attitude (shared by Jomo Kenyatta and the British) that neither side was without sin, and that the best choice for Kenya was to bury the past. (As a result of Kenyatta's statesmanship, Kenya would be the most prosperous country in that part of Africa.)

Prof. Elkins repeatedly likens the British suppression of Mau Mau to the Nazi extermination of the Jews. She overlooks the fact that, if Jews had been going around slaughtering German families in their homes, the World would have found Hitler's antisemitism understandable. Even then, however, the World, while accepting internment, would not have condoned extermination. (Earth to Prof. Elkins: the British did not exterminate the Kikuyu tribe, host of Mau Mau.)

Prof. Elkins is not entirely honest with her readers. For example, she condemns British suppression of "nationalists in Malaya ... [who] were demanding their independence." She omits mentioning that the supposed "nationalists" were Communists drawn exclusively from Malaya's ethnic Chinese minority, rejected by the ethnic Malay majority.

Prof. Elkins makes incomplete analogies. She likens British "hearts and minds" rehabilitation of Mau Mau internees to widely-condemned Chinese "brainwashing" of US PoWs in the Korean War. That is true as far as it goes, but omits perspective at the other end of the spectrum: many societies subject common criminals to such "brainwashing" without controversy. Insurgent rebels (at least those who use terrorist tactics) logically fall somewhere between PoWs, protected by well-established international law, and common criminals.

Prof. Elkins tries to stir hatred of the ethnic British settlers with lurid allegations of sexual libertinism.

Prof. Elkins's agenda appears to be two-fold:
(1) to make it illegitimate to resist insurgency--
She blames Britain not only for the 11,000 deaths the British acknowledge, but also for a shortfall of 130,000 to 300,000 in the census of Kikuyu. Quite likely 8 years of insurgent war, destroying as it does the distinction between civilians and soldiers, and its resultant poverty, could slow down Kikuyu population growth by that much, but was it entirely the fault of the British? Leftists tend to blame all the losses from insurgent war on the government if the government is pro-Western, but on the insurgents if the government is anti-Western (eg. Sandinista Nicaragua).

(2) To revive Mau Mau hatreds and evict the remaining ethnic whites, as Robert Mugabe has been doing in Zimbabwe.--
But destroying one of the most productive sectors of Kenya's economy would not alleviate Kikuyu land hunger for more than a few years of population growth.



Rating:
Summary: A CATALOGUE OF BRITISH ATROCITIES !
Review: This book confirms again what has been known for many years:the so-called "civilizing process" of the British empire in the colonies was a process involving mass crimes, tortures, killings, expulsions,ethnic cleansing and other unimaginable horrors perpetrated by the famous British 'gentleman'.
A brilliant book, masterfully researched and documented which will hammer at you on every page.