Book summary

This account of the horrific treatment of Kikuyu people in a prison-camp system established by the British colonial rulers in 1950's Kenya lays bare a long-suppressed chapter in the history of atrocity. Harvard historian Caroline Elkins researched the extant official documents (many were destroyed in 1963 as the British departed from Kenya). She also interviewed detainees who survived, as well as guards and others. Her eye-opening book tells how tens of thousands of people were brutalized in the name of civilization, while the world remained unaware. The Mau Mau uprising was portrayed as a threat to innocent British farmers, government workers, and their families, as well as a threat to British rule, and so a state of emergency was declared. Elkins reveals that the British magnified the threat and manufactured, for the general public, a picture of the Mau Maus as savages. Using this as justification, the British military moved large numbers of Kikuyu into prison camps, where they suffered harsh conditions, disease, brutality, torture, collective punishment, forced labor, electrocution, rape, and hangings. For the record, Elkins explicitly recounts the degrading and sadistic torture and mutilations--many of a sexual nature--perpetrated by the British. Offering a lesson in how colonial power worked in 1950's Kenya, Caroline Elkins's book resonates with disturbing relevance to present times.