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© 2006 The Historical Association and Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

Histories of the Hanged: Britain’s Dirty War in Kenya and the End of Empire.

ByDavid Anderson.

Weidenfeld & Nicolson. 2005. x + 406pp. £20.00.

Britain’s Gulag: The Brutal End of Empire in Kenya.

By Caroline Elkins.

Jonathan Cape. 2005. xvi + 475pp. £20.00.In 1958, Ian Henderson and Philip Goodhart published

The Hunt for Kimathi

,a stirring tale of British forces hunting down a savage Mau Mau terrorist. In 2002,nearly forty years after Kenyan independence, a rather different hunt commencedin the grounds of Kamiti prison. Once again, the object was Dedan Kimathi,although this time the quest was for his bones. They lay alongside those of manyof the other 1,090 Kikuyu hanged by the British in the course of the Mau Mauemergency. Anderson’s excellent book seeks to explain why, at the very time themovement for the abolition of capital punishment was gaining ground in theUnited Kingdom, the British authorities were willing to make such bloodthirstyuse of the gallows in Kenya. Indeed, it does far more, examining the divisionswithin Kikuyu society that helped to produce Mau Mau, and pointing to theterrible suffering caused to Africans on both sides of the conflict by variouswaves of guerrilla violence and brutal retaliation (by contrast, only thirty-twoEuropean civilians were killed in Mau Mau attacks – fewer than died in roadaccidents between 1952 and 1960). In the process it provides clues as to why theremains of Kimathi and his colleagues had to wait so much longer to be trans-formed into sacred nationalist relics than did those, say, of the executed leadersof the 1916 rising in Ireland. For Elkins, those hanged by the British for theirassociation with Mau Mau were victims of a far broader phenomenon: a‘murderous campaign to eliminate Kikuyu people, a campaign that left tens ofthousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, dead’. Assertions of this kind haveearned her book as high a public profile as any study of British imperialismpublished in recent years. Yet they have also exposed Elkins to accusations ofsensationalism. Her attempts to estimate the numbers killed as a result of Britishactions have attracted particularly fierce criticism; and it is difficult not to sidewith Elkins’s detractors on this point. Elkins’s claim that casualty rates mayhave run into hundreds of thousands rests principally upon an analysis of censusdata, the methodology of which – as David Elstein has pointed out – is seriouslyflawed. Furthermore, although she convincingly points to a callous indifferenceon the part of the British authorities towards the human cost of regaining controlin Kenya, she fails to establish that there was anything that could reasonably bedescribed as a ‘campaign to eliminate Kikuyu people’. The distinction might, ofcourse, have been lost on the brutalized inmates of the Kenyan detention camps;and for all its flaws, Elkins’s study remains of considerable value as a chronicleof such abuses. Anyone with even a passing familiarity with the documentation onthe British campaign against Mau Mau will be aware that it includes a numberof distinct cupboards bulging with skeletons. These range from the summaryexecutions carried out by white reservists and members of the Kikuyu HomeGuard, through the deaths from typhoid and beatings in the detention camp‘pipeline’, and finally to the dangerous policy of sanctioning the use of ‘compel-ling force’ against recalcitrant detainees, which was partially exposed in 1959following the beating to death of eleven inmates at the Hola detention camp. Startlingevidence has long been available in the files of the National Archives, but Elkinsis the first scholar to have brought these various strands of this ‘dirty war’ togetherin a single, powerful narrative. Confronted with such gruesome material, she

428 REVIEWS AND SHORT NOTICES

© 2006 The Historical Association and Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

might be forgiven for having reached for analogies with some of the more mur-derous regimes of the twentieth century. Even Anderson, whose rhetoric (likehis arithmetic) is rather more restrained, makes reference to the Kenyan ‘gulag’.

Comparisons with other British territories are instructive. Anderson is partic-ularly good on the treatment of offenders elsewhere in British Africa, whileElkins draws some interesting distinctions between the emergencies in Kenya andMalaya. Indeed, both books would have benefited from even more comparativeanalysis. Neither, for example, makes sufficient reference to the treatment ofEOKA suspects in Cyprus at about the same time. Anderson’s comparisons withBritish administrative practice elsewhere in Africa reinforce the impression thatthe harsh treatment of Mau Mau suspects was in large measure the result ofKenya being a ‘settler state’ rather than simply a colonial state. Long before theoutbreak of Mau Mau, European settler anxieties about crime and disorder hadencouraged the development of a particularly punitive regime in the territory. In1938, Kenya imprisoned 154 out of every 100,000 of its inhabitants, as opposedto 114 in Uganda and only 54 in Tanganyika. Flogging as a judicial punishmentwas also far more common in Kenya than in Uganda or Tanganyika. It is hardlysurprising then, that with the onset of the emergency, the need to satisfy the settlerpopulation’s desire for revenge intensified the brutality of the British administra-tion’s response. A striking comparison with the Malayan emergency is the farhigher numbers of suspects the Kenya government held in detention (at its peakin December 1954, the figure was 71,346). This was, as Elkins notes, not merelya consequence of the Kenya government’s fondness for incarceration. TheMalayan government deported to China more than half of the 30,000 suspectsit arrested. For the Kenya government, deportation was not an option: hencethe construction of the network of detention camps. The vulnerability of theKikuyu was enhanced by the fact that, unlike the Chinese communists inMalaya or the Greek Cypriots of EOKA, they did not have an advocate in theinternational community to monitor their treatment and publicize any abuses.Indeed, racial attitudes at the time made it particularly easy to demonize MauMau and, by extension, to smear those on the anti-colonial left in Britain whotook up the cause of the detainees. Elkins and Anderson have produced rich andfascinating studies, the contemporary relevance of which to the current ‘war onterrorism’ will not be lost on their readers.

University of Reading

PHILIP MURPHY

Between East and West: The Moluccas and the Traffic in Spices up to the Arrivalof Europeans.

By Robin A. Donkin.

American Philosophical Society. 2003. xx +274pp. $40.00.

This book assembles everything that is known about cloves, nutmeg and sandal-wood, the luxury products of the Moluccas, in the period before the arrival ofthe Portuguese in the second decade of the sixteenth century. Information aboutthe botany and geography of the plants, their nomenclature in literally dozens oflanguages, their ritual, culinary and medicinal uses, the routes along which theywere traded and their cultural significance is painstakingly assembled from everyknown source ranging from temple inscriptions in ancient India to monasticdocuments from the Carolingian empire. The whole point of this book is toexplore obscure etymologies and fleeting references in difficult-to-interpret