Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain's Gulag in Kenya
Encyclopedia
Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain's Gulag in Kenya written by Caroline Elkins
Caroline Elkins
Caroline Elkins is a professor of History at Harvard University. She studies the colonial encounter in Africa during the twentieth century, and the British treatment of the Kikuyu in Kenya....

, published by Henry Holt
Henry Holt and Company
Henry Holt and Company is an American book publishing company. One of the oldest publishers in the United States, it was founded in 1866 by Henry Holt and Frederick Leypoldt...

, won the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction
Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction
The Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction has been awarded since 1962 for a distinguished book of non-fiction by an American author that is not eligible for consideration in another category.-1960s:...

.

Commentary and Criticism

Elkins' work was criticized by historian Lawrence James
Lawrence James
Edwin James Lawrence , most commonly known as Lawrence James, is an English academic, notable for his works as a writer and historian. He has written several works of popular history about the British Empire...

 in The Sunday Times
The Sunday Times (UK)
The Sunday Times is a Sunday broadsheet newspaper, distributed in the United Kingdom. The Sunday Times is published by Times Newspapers Ltd, a subsidiary of News International, which is in turn owned by News Corporation. Times Newspapers also owns The Times, but the two papers were founded...

as being a one-sided account of the Mau Mau Uprising
Mau Mau Uprising
The Mau Mau Uprising was a military conflict that took place in Kenya between 1952 and 1960...

. In an article in The Guardian
The Guardian
The Guardian, formerly known as The Manchester Guardian , is a British national daily newspaper in the Berliner format...

, James, in turn, was criticized for "whitewashing the history of the British empire".

Nicholas Best, acknowledging that "there can be no excuse for what happened" in Kenya, questioned Elkins' detention and casualty figures as "ludicrous" and accused Elkins of being selective in her sources.

Richard Dowden wrote a critical review of Elkins' book in The Guardian
The Guardian
The Guardian, formerly known as The Manchester Guardian , is a British national daily newspaper in the Berliner format...

. James Mitchell, in a highly critical review of the book, said "I shudder for those of her students who expect academic rigour: Elkins doesn't let facts stand in the way of a good rant."

The BBC documentary Kenya: White Terror was based on Elkins' controversial research into the Mau Mau. It aired on Sunday 17 November 2002 on BBC Two at 1915 GMT and subsequently on BBC World. As a result of complaints made against this documentary, Ofcom (the British broadcasting watchdog) ruled that the programme had been partially unfair to Terrence Gavaghan, whom Elkins accuses of brutality.

Elkins' Harvard colleague Niall Ferguson
Niall Ferguson
Niall Campbell Douglas Ferguson is a British historian. His specialty is financial and economic history, particularly hyperinflation and the bond markets, as well as the history of colonialism.....

, who praised Elkins for her research which he described as "painstaking", nevertheless described her book as a "sensationalist" account of the rebellion.

In 2007, the demographer John Blacker writing in African Affairs demonstrated in detail that Elkins' estimates of casualties were grossly over estimated.

The historian Bethwell Ogot, from Moi University
Moi University
Moi University is a Kenyan public university located in Eldoret, western Kenya. It is one of seven fully fledged public institutions of higher learning in Kenya...

, has written in reviewing Elkins’ book that Mau Mau fighters who were involved in the war (against the British and the Africans who supported the British):

Contrary to African customs and values, assaulted old people, women and children. The horrors they practiced included the following: decapitation and general mutilation of civilians, torture before murder, bodies bound up in sacks and dropped in wells, burning the victims alive, gouging out of eyes, splitting open the stomachs of pregnant women. No war can justify such gruesome actions. In man’s inhumanity to man there is no race distinction. The Africans were practising it on themselves. There was no reason and no restraint on both sides, although Elkins sees no atrocities on the part of Mau Mau".


The historian Susan Carruthers from Rutgers University
Rutgers University
Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey , is the largest institution for higher education in New Jersey, United States. It was originally chartered as Queen's College in 1766. It is the eighth-oldest college in the United States and one of the nine Colonial colleges founded before the American...

has written in reviewing Elkins’ book that:

In her determination to redress imperial propaganda's stereotypes of Mau Mau savagery, Elkins leans into unintended condescension, lauding the Kikuyu's "sophisticated" appreciation of British hypocrisy. (Why wouldn't those most thoroughly dislocated appreciate the character of European colonialism better than anyone?) Conversely, Elkins' settlers and colonial administrators are cartoonish grotesques: "These privileged men and women lived an absolutely hedonistic lifestyle, filled with sex, drugs, drink and dance, followed by more of the same"
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