Grim Reading

My favorite bookstore in Austin, Texas, is BookPeople. When I'm in Austin visiting my son, I usually take time to drop by BookPeople and pore over the store's sales tables and shelves. By doing this, I've discovered some winners, including Caroline Elkins' book Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain's Gulag in Kenya (2005), an examination of the Mau Mau uprising in Kenya in the fifties and the British response to that uprising. This book won a Pulitzer for General Non-fiction in 2006. It's very grim reading.

The book interested me because I know so little about colonialism in Africa outside of what I learned in general history classes, what I've read over the years in book reviews and the passing article or two, and what I've caught in news stories on current events in Africa. And Africa is much in the news today, with genocide in Darfur, Sudan, the disputed elections and violence in Kenya and in Zimbabwe, and post-election violence in Nigeria.

Elkins' book is an eye-opener, and a must-read for anyone who wants to understand more fully the consequences of imperial powers' exporting their world view, their sense of superiority, and their military might. The Mau Mau conflict in Kenya arose out of years of native subjugation to British rule. The most advantageous land was wrested from tribes and given to white British settlers. The Kikuyu were relegated to reserves, as were other tribes, to land that was less fertile and to areas that were too small to provide for their growing populations. According to Caroline Elkins, the Kikuyu "was the ethnic group most affected by the colonial government's policies of land alienation, or expropriation, and European settlement" (12). Agriculturalists, the Kikuyu "lost over sixty thousand acres to the settlers, mostly in southern Kiambu, a highly fertile region just outside of Nairobi that would become some of the most productive European farmland in the colony."

Over the years, tribes brought their grievances to the British government, but the government favored white settlers and British needs over that of the natives. And, of course, racism was rampant. The British ruling class lived leisured lives supported by native servants. In the fifties, thousands of Kikuyu--and some from other tribes--took oaths of allegiance to fighting British colonialism and to evicting Europeans from Kenya. Thus began a bloody guerrilla war. The colonial government's response was to create "transit" camps in which tens of thousands of Kikuyus (and some other tribal members) were incarcerated--and creating a detainee population of over 52,000, scattered in various camps and militarily-confined villages.

As I read the descriptions of these camps and of the treatment of men, women, and children in these camps, I could not help comparing what happened here, at the hands of the British, to what happened in Nazi concentration camps. The numbers might have been smaller, the eventual dead less numerous, but the torture as horrendous. And this was governmentally-approved torture, official torture.

The goal of the British colonial government was to get Kikuyus to confess their Mau-Mau affiliations and to provide intelligence of any Mau Mau movements and plans. In addition to using British settlers and soldiers, the colonial government used loyalist Kikuyus and members of other tribes to subjugate those resisting--thus ensuring hatred between these groups for generations to come.

In Operation Anvil, the Kikuyu living in Nairobi were rounded up, Gestapo-like, by British soldiers. Many of these detainees were strip-searched, relieved of their valuables, packed in enclosed rail cars for the trip to one of the camps, forced through a cattle dip of disinfectant, forced to strip and were provided with little clothing in exchange (for men--a pair of shorts and a couple of blankets). And they were given identity bracelets with a number on them. These people were "screened" to get them to confess their Mau Mau sympathies, screenings which included being whipped, beaten, sodomized, burned, and forced to eat feces and drink urine. Life in the camps was horrific, where diseases such as typhoid spread. Women were raped. Men were castrated. Others were summarily executed. Thousands of children died. Truly brutal people were put in charge of many of the camps.

One Labour MP, Barbara Castle, became a public critic of British policies in Kenya, but Colonial Secretary Alan Lennox-Boyd maintained these camps by outright lying to the British people--all in the name of national security. High-level British officials knew that they were violating international human rights treaties but used "national security" (as well as lying) to side-step those legal issues. Detainees were held without the right to a fair trial or legal help. The government often fabricated charges, but the detainees could not even find out what those charges were in order to address them. Charges were unspecified for "security reasons." Detainees who smuggled out letters describing their horrific circumstances were punished if caught. Sometimes the entire camp was punished. And, of course, people who had only slightly supported the land and freedom movement became radicalized by their treatment in the camps.

Many British records of this time have disappeared, been purged. But people who suffered in these camps still live. As I read this book, I couldn't help draw parallels with the atrocities associated with the war in Iraq, with the mind-set of people who think they are above international and even national law.

For more information:
"British Brutality in Mau Mau Conflict", by John McGhie, in The Guardian
"10 Downing Street's Gulag", in Harvard Magazine
"What's Tearing Kenya Apart? History, for One Thing," by Caroline Elkins, in The Washington Post
"Who are the Kikuyu?" by Michela Wrong, in Slate
a book review by R. W. Johnson, in the Times Online
another book review, by Richard Dowden, in The Guardian