Brutal End of Empire in Kenya, by (onathan Cape) ISBN: 022407363X Histories of the Hanged: Britain's Dirty War in Kenya and the End of Empire David Anderson (Weidenfeld & Nicholson) ISBN: 0297847198 Liam Mac Uaid reviews two books dealing with the bloody end of the British Empire British imperialism has always presented itself as the reasonable imperialism. British troops in Iraq are less brutal than the Americans. Britain would never fight a dirty war like the French in Algeria or conduct neargenocide like the Belgians in the Congo.
The British Empire was all about building railways, introducing cricket and keeping warring sides apart.
These two books are a perfect antidote to this imperial myth-making. They deal with Britain's suppression of the Mau Mau rebellion in Kenya between 1952 and 1957.
British settlers had stolen all the best land in Kenya. One and a quarter million members of the Kikuyu tribe were restricted to 2000 square miles of territory while 30,000 settlers occupied 12,000 square miles.
The settlers' methods of farming were so inefficient that they relied on government subsidies for survival. The Kikuyus' land was insufficient to feed the population and they were forbidden to grow cash crops, these being the preserve of the whites.
Many Kenyans served with the British army in World War Two. They returned home with military training and radicalisation.
The late 1940s saw strikes and boycotts against colonial rule. In May 1950 the British crushed a nine-day general strike in Nairobi with a show of military force, arresting the union leaders.
With the end of the strike wave, the resistance began to take new forms. Farmers reinvented a custom of "oathing" that had been common in rural agitation in England and Ireland in the previous two centuries.
The Kenyan peasant rebels began by killing prominent local collaborators with the authorities using the primitive weapons they had and the majority of their victims were Kikuyu. Thirty-two European settlers were killed during the rebellion.
The rebels became known as Mau Mau. Nobody is sure what it means or why it was used. In any event the rebels and their families suffered dreadfully. Anderson estimates that they lost 20 000 against losses of 200 for the police and army.
But it is Elkins' descriptions of the British run camps that is truly horrifying. She estimates that 320,000 people, about one third of the total Kikuyu population, were held in them. Children's mortality was so great that babies were buried six at a time and the hard labour involved burying the bodies from other camps in mass graves.
All the while starvation and torture of prisoners were practised on a wide scale. There was a reward system.
If you confessed to taking an oath and were sufficiently compliant you were moved along a "pipeline" to a slightly easier regime.
Otherwise the camp guards were prepared to mercilessly beat anyone reluctant to confess.
Elkins' research indicates that a minimum of 136,000 Kikuyu were killed by the British counter-insurgency campaign.
These two books are a useful addition to the growing literature on the real brutality that must be a part of imperialism.
One or both of them deserves a place on the shelf of anyone interested in African history or who wants to know what the British Empire was really like for those who suffered it.