With Study of Mau Mau, Prof Creates Masterpiece

Over the past decade, Assistant Professor of History Caroline M. Elkins has carefully crafted her maiden work, a 500-page indictment of British authorities’ repression of the Mau Mau uprising in post-World War II Kenya. Imperial Reckoning is a composite of oral interviews and painstaking documentary research that already seems destined to become the authoritative work on an important but under-discussed episode in African history.

The fluid narrative tells the story of Mau Mau—a term whose origins are unclear even today—a rebellion incited after the British settled in the traditional homeland of the Kikuyu, which pushed 1.5 million people onto reservations governed by puppet “chiefs.” Kikuyu resentment of British settlers escalated into Mau Mau, a rebellion whose adherents hacked to death about 2,000 European settlers and Kikuyu “loyalists.” While these deaths have been well-documented, Elkins’ work focuses, by contrast, on the many Kikuyu who were detained and killed by British forces in retaliation for the Mau Mau insurgency.

Elkins’ primary accomplishment is that she makes rubbish of the official British claim that only 11,000 Mau Mau were killed in action. The embarrassed British destroyed most incriminating documents years ago, so instead Elkins sought out private collections that escaped incineration and talked to now-elderly Mau Mau adherents. Where no damning official record exists, she has analyzed population records, piecing together the number of Kikuyu missing or killed under the auspices of the British.

Invariably, Mau Mau has either been distorted by British survivors or rendered incomprehensible by anthropologists. Elkins’ work directly combats this syndrome and serves as an accessible narrative of Mau Mau, from beginning to end; in pursuit of this goal, she has created one of those rare history books which is immensely readable, even to someone who knows little about British colonial history.

Sadly, the popular aspect of Elkins’ history also takes Imperial Reckoning off-track. In an attempt to help her non-academic audience understand the Mau Mau, she uses tropes like “Nazism” for comparison’s sake and drops the word “genocide” numerous times. Eager to make this relatively unknown episode seem relevant to book-buying audiences, she has avoided using “Mau Mau” in her work’s title. Instead, she gives the out-of-context label “gulag” to the British labor camps used to detain suspected Mau Mau rebels.

European settlers in Kenya felt that “Mau Mau adherents did not belong to the human race,” claims Elkins. She compares the vilification of Jews with settlers’ characterizations of Mau Mau. These European settlers described the important Mau Mau initiation oath—which involved goat intestines, blood-drinking, the eating of raw flesh, and so on—as “bestial” and un-Christian. I must confess that I do not understand the zinger in her argumentation. Lest anyone forget, Mau Mau was a violent movement whose initiation oath included nearly all of the things settlers alleged it did. The insurgents did not spare the lives of women and children. And while Mau Mau’s body count was, as Elkins skillfully demonstrates, not as high as the death toll inflicted by the settlers, the insurgents matched the settlers in the realm of brutality. By contrast, Nazi claims of brutal acts committed by Jews against the Germans were unfounded, and untrue.

The British repression of Mau Mau was an act of injustice—but not a genocide. First and foremost, Mau Mau was not an ethnic group—although it was an almost entirely Kikuyu uprising—and sometimes Elkins intermingles the two terms. There was never any shortage of Kikuyu loyalists willing to point fingers at Mau Mau, and the British were always pleased to promote these Kikuyu to the highest position any African could attain. Moreover, membership in Mau Mau unambiguously hinged on a specific induction oath that created an ideological distinction within a larger ethnic community. Not all Kikuyu were Mau Mau, and not all Kikuyu were targeted for elimination by the British. The Kikuyu experience under colonial rule was multifaceted: no one suffered as much as the Mau Mau, but no one benefited as much as the Kikuyu collaborators.

Elkins’ inclusion of the term “gulag” in her work’s title as a description of colonial Kenya’s labor camps is similarly troubling. Professor of History Niall Ferguson has already labeled Elkins’ use of the term “wildly inappropriate,” and this criticism seems on-point. “Gulag” in Elkins’ mind appears to mean any camp system where detainees are thrust into a system of forced labor. This usage of “gulag” divorces the term from its uniquely Soviet context, where the police state’s totalitarian power was inexorably linked to that government’s policy of detention and murder.

European settlers’ fear of death at Mau Mau’s hands ignited a vicious colonial response that is damning, to be sure. But Britain’s colonial empire in East Africa was not an unambiguously evil empire. In what is today Tanzania, immediately south of Kenya, and where fewer settlers lived, the British replacement of the German colonial power in the wake of World War I saved the lives of many Africans, who were oppressed and persecuted substantially more by the German government. There, the British used their might to finally put an end to slavery and embarked on public works projects never seen before or since British colonial rule. Many Africans who lived during colonial times do not feel the hostility that seemingly should exist toward their colonial rulers, who are often purported to be, without exception, heavy-handed racists. Yet, many speak fondly of their missionary educations, and it is hard to travel through the country without seeing the libraries, schools, hospitals, and roads constructed by the British that are now left to decay by a government whose corruption everyone seems to understand. The ultimate question to be asked and today answered typically in the starry-eyed sort of way is: does this excuse the racism of colonial rule?

Elkins’ work on Kenya does history a great service by filling in the gap of knowledge about Mau Mau. It is something that, Elkins compellingly argues, should be discussed not only in the ranks of academia but also in Kenya, where until recently, mentioning Mau Mau has been taboo, punishable by imprisonment without trial. Yet when it comes time for a discussion, the full breadth of conflict—Mau Mau’s savagery and likewise Britain’s settler-inspired savage response—should be on the table.

—Staff writer Travis R. Kavulla can be reached at kavulla@fas.harvard.edu.