2- Mau Mau: Understanding Counter-Insurgency

Abstract

Imperial Reckoning, The Untold Story of Britain’s Gulag in Kenya
by Caroline Elkins
Henry Holt, 2005, 475 pages, $27.50, ISBN-0-8050-7653-0.
Histories of the Hanged: The Dirty War in Kenya
and the End of Empire
by David Anderson
Norton, 2005, 406 pages, $25.95, ISBN 0-393-05986-3.

Who authored the atrocities linked with the Mau Mau? How did Mau Mau, which began as an armed movement against settler power in the White Highlands of Kenya, turn into a civil war among the Kikuyu of the Central Province? The Mau Mau killed only 32 white settlers. “More European civilians would die in road traffic accidents between 1952 and 1960,” notes Anderson. Other Mau Mau victims included some 200 British regimental soldiers and police and 1800 African civilians. The numbers explode when we come to count the Mau Mau dead. The official figure is that of 12,000. Anderson says it is “more than 20,000.” But Elkins presents a radical reappraisal of the counter- insurgency both in scale and human cost: “If the Kikuyu population figure in 1962 is adjusted using growth rates comparable to the other Africans, we find that somewhere between 130,000 and 300,000 Kikuyu are unaccounted for. … I now believe that there was in late colonial Kenya a murderous campaign to eliminate Kikuyu people”