Caroline Elkins, author of Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain's Gulag in Kenya, tells The American Prospect's Heather Bobrow how she found out about the the systemized violence used against Kenyan natives in detention camps from 1952 to 1960.
Can you give some brief historical background on Mau Mau?
Mau Mau was a grass-roots movement in Kenya in the late 1940s that was a response to decades of frustration with British colonial rule. Of all of the groups affected by colonialism, the Kikuyu people of Kenya felt the weight of British authority and exploitation the most. This was due, in part, to the alienation of part of their land by the British colonial government. This land was, in turn, parceled out to the incoming European settler population. As a result, by World War II the Kikuyu were aggrieved and were demanding a return of their “stolen land” and an end to the repressive labor laws. As a way of forging allegiance to the growing anti-colonial movement, the Kikuyu took an oath which bound them to the movement's demands of ithaka na wiyathi, or “land and freedom.” This movement was given the name of Mau Mau by the British colonial government. Violence escalated, and on October 20, 1952, Kenya's governor declared a state of emergency and launched the colony into the Mau Mau war.
How was Mau Mau perceived by the global audience?
Mau Mau was perceived as a movement without real basis for legitimacy; not only was it illegitimate, but it was portrayed as the most savage, horrible, bestial thing that had ever happened. People just recoiled in horror from Mau Mau, which was a testament to how effective the public-relations campaign was.
In 1953 the British rounded up the Kikuyu people and forced them into detention camps. Your intention in 1997 was to write a history of the success of Britain's civilizing mission in these camps. At what point in your research did you realize the topic would change?
This book started out as my dissertation topic. I was going to focus largely on the success of liberal reform in the detention camps, or the program known as rehabilitation. The big “aha!” moment happened about a year or so into my research. I really got into the official documents and went through [them] file by file, while at the same time I went through private archives and interviewed former British colonial officials. Many documents were classified and had been destroyed, and things just weren't making sense. My hypothesis wasn't working. So I started to think, what if these camps were about systematized violence?
Why do you think no one has written about the Mau Mau war in the way you have before?
In the academic world, Mau Mau is a huge topic, but nobody has written about the detention camps. In Kenya, there has been official silencing, and in the U.K., any blemish was erased from the official record. Academics have been writing about less of what happened and more of what Mau Mau was. And while it's difficult to do research on Mau Mau in Kenya, I was young and naive enough to do it. Once you start asking the question of what happened during this war, it opens up a whole can of worms because nothing has been asked or answered since the time of war.
It sounds like the British took great measures to cover up what happened during the war. How were you able to access these records?
The records are sanitized, but even the best of purges leave something behind. And in my case, it took a young historian with a lot of time -- and the support of a wealthy institution with unlimited research money -- to do this project and put it all back together again.
Imperial Reckoning often reads like a piece of investigative journalism. Do you see overlap between the work of historians and the work of journalists, or is this book an exception?
I think that it certainly started out as a more traditional kind of project, but as I went along it felt more and more like I was doing investigative work, going down leads and rabbit trails. Good journalists aren't all that different from good historians. In essence, I think that anyone who is after “truth” is grounded in the same kind of discipline and the same kind of quest to get sources right.
Much of Imperial Reckoning is based on oral histories. How integral were these to uncovering the torture in the detention camps?
The interviews were essential in order to give voices to the people who had experienced the detention camps. Their voices are by and large absent from the records. Therefore it became an integral part of the project to go and meet people and earn their trust and have them open up to me. Many of these individuals hadn't spoken about Mau Mau in years -- in decades -- and had no reason to trust me other than finally realizing that I had no other good reason to be out there. By the time I had entered into the community, the floodgates opened. The vast majority of people didn't ask for anything in return. They wanted to make certain the world knew what happened to them. Because they were near the end of their lives, they wanted to be sure that this was not left as a forgotten moment.
You note that the detention camps were primarily composed of men. What role did Kikuyu women play in the war?
I think that when women write about women and war, they think, “How can we write women into the male narrative?” In this case, women did not fight in the forest where the heroic guerillas fought. There was only one all-female detention camp, and the men spent a lot of time talking about how much harder it was for the women out in the villages. In the villages, there was virtually no regulation at all, and very little outside intervention. The fact that rape was so widespread in the villages -- a point that led many men to feel ashamed that they were absent and unable to protect their women -- was also, I believe, a major factor in the men's evaluation of village life. Again, the men were unable to protect their families, something that was an incredible source of shame for them.
You remark in your book that the survival and resistance techniques used by detainees are often universal. Was there anything unique to what went on in the Mau Mau detention camps?
One unique aspect was the Kikuyu belief system. Detainees prayed to Mount Kenya and the god Ngai. As the situation in the camps got worse, there was an evolution away from Christianity, and the Kikuyu people began to hold on to a different belief system.
Can you talk about “screening,” or the interrogation process used in the detention camps? How would you say this compares with modern-day interrogation tactics?
It's sad but true that there are only so many ways that one can get information out of somebody. Some of the images that I saw during the Abu Ghraib scandal reminded me of things that I heard described about the detention camps. The events are very similar and disheartening when you have a couple of elements involved: strong dehumanization of the enemy, a strong sense of moral righteousness, and a structure like confinement. It's a recipe for disaster.
Would you draw similarities between the human-rights violations committed by the British in Kenya and the war on terrorism today?
When I was writing the final chapter, I talk about 11 detainees who are bludgeoned to death. What's unusual about this incident is that the British get caught. I'm writing this exactly when Abu Ghraib happens, and the similarities are so unmistakable: 1959 was an election year, and there was a strong belief that no one would lose an election because of this; the British government blamed the violence during Mau Mau on a couple of bad apples, while meanwhile they knew that this was a systematic approach to torture and abuse; the official line is to deny as much as possible and withdraw. The same kind of process is playing out in contemporary events.
Imperial Reckoning shows that propaganda played a large role in the Mau Mau war. How would you compare the depiction of Mau Mau in the media with today's events?
In Kenya, Mau Mau was in the papers enough and people knew the war was going on. The government said that these incidents were not indicative of broader, wide-scale abuse in camps. Yet certain people in the U.K. were relentless with their suspicions, which teaches us to trust your instinct and keep pressuring away. We need to continue asking questions.
Martyn Day, the human-rights attorney, is filing a case against the British government for the atrocities committed against the Kikuyu people during the Mau Mau war. Can you talk about the role Imperial Reckoning will play?
The book helps as historical documentation about this period of time. The fact that I was able to put this story together gives hope that others can do the same. When I recently launched Imperial Reckoning in Kenya, the vice president of Kenya, Moody Awori, was with me at the launch. He used the launch as an opportunity to demand a formal apology for war crimes and human-rights violations during the Mau Mau emergency. On the civil side there is the reparations case, and on the government side there is the demand for official recognition and apology. I think the new regime in Kenya is looking toward reorienting the national historical narrative; part of that automatically begs the question about apology and recognition from the British.
What's next for you?
I'm interested in looking at whether Kenya was an exception in counterinsurgency tactics in the British regime after World War II. Today some theorists on counterinsurgency models hold up the British model as a success; however, as seen with Mau Mau, these tactics have dramatic long-term implications and devastating consequences.
Heather Bobrow is a freelance writer in New York.
