The Imperial Project

Damn useful corrective to Niall Ferguson in the March 3 London Review of Books. Bernard Porter reviews books by Caroline Elkins and David Anderson on the Mau Mau uprising in Kenya. Also see Neal Ascherson’s review of the same books in the April 7 NYRB, available by subscription only.

The British declared the Kenya Emergency in 1952, when seven years of restless dissatisfaction with British rule culminated in the full-scale rebellion known as Mau Mau. It was very largely the struggle of the Kikuyu, the country’s majority ethnic group – about 1.5 million in a native population of five million – who had lost much of their land to white settlers and had moved into reservations or continued farming as tenants. The Emergency saw out two prime ministers – Churchill and Eden – and ended in January 1960. In that time, Mau Mau supporters killed at least 2000 African civilians and inflicted some 200 casualties on the army and police. In all, 32 white settlers died in the rebellion. For their part, the British hanged more than 1000 Kikuyu, detained at least 150,000 and, according to official figures, killed around 12,000 in combat, though the real figure, in David Anderson’s view, is ‘likely to have been more than 20,000’. In addition, Caroline Elkins claims, up to 100,000 died in the detention camps.

It is the scale of the British atrocities in Kenya that is the most startling revelation of these books.

Heh. And I thought that only francophone imperial powers committed colonial atrocities, and that the British Empire brough civilization, democracy, and crumpets to all of its subjects. Go figure.