Imperial Reckoning by Caroline Elkins

Not long after the world cried out against the Holocaust, formed the International tribunals, established the UN and drafted the Genocide Convention, concentration camps of torture and killing were being set up all over Kenya in response to the Mau Mau rebellion. With the shameful, and especially barbaric history that British colonialism has in Africa, the story of the Kikuyu land people is an important piece of the past that has been lost in the shuffle of colonialism. It is easy to dismiss the distant past, cleansed by the sanitizing effect that time often has. After this book came out, the Kenyan government demanded an apology from the UK goverment. And this is what they received:

"But this took place 50 years ago. Kenya needs to look to future challenges like fighting corruption, fighting injustice and building a strong democracy," --spokesman from the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office


This was a difficult book to read. Dry and tedious, despite the lurid and often fascinating descriptions of the Mau Mau rebellion. While the torture and killings were hard to digest, what made the book especially unpleasant was the needless redundancy found throughout. It was as if Caroline Elkins was convinced that no one would actually read the whole book page to page, so it's best to repeat herself every five pages or so. For example, the role of the Christian missionaries during the detention of the Kikuyu land people. This is in fact, a complicated and often contradictory story that Elkins manages to flatten out and reduce to sound bites and cliches.

The voice given to the silently suffering masses of the Kikuyu people is one thing that is especially touted by the press around this book. And for the most part, Elkins does scrupulously relate long quotes from the victims telling their story (and then other victims telling the same story). However, the reader never gets to know any one person beyond their identity as one of the tortured masses of Africans. For example, the potentially interesting tale of two sisters who were part of the Mau Mau rebellion, who were captured, tortured and who survived their ordeal. It was disappointing to have their stories melt into the landscape of the concentration camps.

I wish Elkins had described her own fascinating story--one of a graduate student doing work on her dissertation on the Mau Mau rebellion which instead unearthed a decade's worth of evidence against the British government. A story that she touches on in the preface, and which I found to be one of the most interesting parts of the book. It was almost as if once she had finished gathering her astonishing interviews, she could not wait long enough to edit it into a compelling book, before disseminating it to audiences.