'Just World News' with Helena Cobban

Caroline Elkins' Mau Mau book, contd.

Editorial note: I put this post up last night. It elicited some interesting & helpful comments. This morning I wanted to correct a couple of typos in it & put in a couple more page numbers... But by mistake I 'deleted' the whole post! Yikes! Luckily I still had one loaded on my browser, so now I'm reposting it here (with those comments.) Sorry for any confusion caused. If you want to link to this post, please use the present permalink (above).

On Sunday, I wrote how much I was learning from a book about Britain's shockingly repressive end-of-empire counter-insurgency in Kenya, Caroline Elkins's Imperial Reckoning. One commenter noted there had later been a letter to the NY Review of Books that had questioned some of Elkins' use of her sources.

Today, by chance I picked up an old issue of the NYRB, and there was the letter. It was from David Elstein, who is not a historian of Africa or even, it seems, any kind of expert on matters African. He's a TV producer.

His main criticism was with, as he wrote, the fact that, "She suggests 'hundreds of thousands' of Kikuyu died at British hands—perhaps 300,000."

(Actually, she did not directly write that. She looked at the census records and noted-- p.366-- that, "If the Kikuyu population figure in 1962 is adjusted using growth rates comparable to other [Kenyan] Africans, we find that somewhere between 130,000 and 300,000 Kikuyu are accounted for." She also quotes, without endorsing, a claim by an Asian-Kenyan attorney who had represented thousands of detainees thaas saying that, By the end I would say there were several hundred thousand killed... One hundred thousand easily, though more like two to three hundred thousand. All these people just never came back when it was over."

Her own judgments were that the British counter-insurgency campaign in Kenya, "left tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands dead" (p. xvi); and elsewhere that, "at the very least it is safe to assume that the official [british] figure of some eleven thousand Mau Mau killed is implausible given all that has been discovered."(p.366))

Three weeks earlier, Elstein had sent a letter to the London Review of Books expressing almost exactly the same set of criticisms of Elkins' work. In Britain, her book is titled "Britain's Gulag"; but it's the same book.

That letter received this response in the 7 July edition of the LRB. It's from John Nottingham who writes:

I was a British district officer in Kikuyuland for half the period of the Emergency and directly witnessed some of the events about which Elkins writes. Forty years ago I wrote, with Carl Rosberg, The Myth of 'Mau Mau': Nationalism in Kenya, the first revision of the British colonial government's official history of Mau Mau, as expressed in the Corfield Report of 1960.

Elkins had to go to extreme lengths to research the history of detention in Kenya because the British colonial government, on the eve of decolonisation, and with the imminent advent of African ministers in senior cabinet positions, deliberately and comprehensively destroyed much of the documentation related to the detention camps and barbed-wire villages. As acting district commissioner in Nyeri, I received orders to destroy all files remotely linked to Mau Mau, and I was aware that other officers received and carried out similar orders. In the years immediately after the Emergency, when I was conducting research, it was already clear that there were enormous gaps in the archival record.

In the book, Elkins wrote quite a bit about the British destruction of much of their archives. Nottingham confirmed that for us, from the horse's mouth. The fact of that destruction (1) throws into question the validity of just about all the British figures on actions to do with Mau Mau, and (2) obviously looks very fishy indeed.

The fact of that destruction also makes all the "official figures" that someone like David Elstein bandies about in his letters extremely suspect.

Nottingham also writes,

Elkins's use of the demographic data - her comparison of the Kikuyu, Embu and Meru population figures, taken as a whole - is perfectly sound. The British colonial government levelled its counter-insurgency policies against the Kikuyu, Embu and Meru, three closely related ethnic groups who speak the same Kikuyu language. In the documents still available one will find constant reference to the 'Kikuyu, Embu and Meru', the 'K.E.M.', or even simply the 'Kikuyu', which was often used, and is still, as a shorthand way of referring to the three groups as a whole during the Emergency. To disaggregate them when making a demographic comparison would misrepresent the nature of the war. Analysing the demographic figures for the groups separately would in any case be difficult to do with any accuracy: there have never been precise figures for the different ethnic groups in the camps, nor do we know how many Embu were counted as Kikuyu in the 1962 census.

Elkins argues that the demographic figures, when read alongside the empirical data, are suggestive. As she rightly points out, we will never know precisely how many Africans died during the war, but we can use the remaining historical evidence to make informed revisions of the official death figures. Those preferred by both the colonial government and most scholars appear to be based on the estimates at the end of the Corfield Report, which probably originated from military sources. Today they are unacceptable, excluding as they do the complex network of non-military, semi-official and private bodies associated with the anti-Mau Mau struggle.

Other portions of his letter make eminent sense, too.

Given Nottingham's credentials, as well as those of Caroline Elkins-- who conducted her research on the topic for eight or ten years, as a professional pre-doctoral and then post-doctoral scholar in a rigorous university history department-- I would be inclined to stick with the Elkins-Nottingham view of what happened, rather than with that of this strange, seemingly uncredentialed person who looks as though he is pursuing some kind of slimy international vendetta against Elkins. It reminds me a little of the vendetta that the almost eqully uncredentialed David Stoll launched against Rigoberta Menchu Tum back in 1999.

What is it with these two white guys that they want to hound women who are writing about the extreme plight of indigenous and colonized peoples (of color) at the hands of white overlords? Why do these two men seem so defensive and so eager to keep the previous narrative of "white nobility" quite unchallenged?

... Well, I finished the Elkins book last night. I'm glad. It made often sickening, difficult reading. Not just the accounts of the things the British officers and their "loyalist" African sidekicks did to the "hardcore" Mau Mau in order to try to break their will. But also the extreme rhetorical and administrative violence they launched to try to silence anyone who-- black or white-- who tried to get the truth out.

(Actually, correct that: blacks who tried to get the truth out-- in long, very well-written letters they smuggled out of the camps to sympathisers outside-- would usually, if caught, be subjected to extreme physical violence, as well as the other kinds.)

As I wrote on Sunday, there are very very many parallels with the situation of the Bushiies with regard to Iraq, and the Israelis with regard to Palestine...

A few quick assessments of what was happening at that time:

(1) The actions of many churches look deeply morally flawed, from the docs that Elkins unearthed. Mau Mau was a set of oaths or covenants that Kikuyu nationalist would pledge to each other in their fight for "land and freedom". They were based on indigenous Kikuyu religion. The British effort to "break" Mau Mau was focused on getting the oath-takers to disavow those oaths-- or, in colonial parlance, "confess" their oaths. (They were also required to "confess" organizational details like who was organizing the oathing, etc. But getting them to confess-- i.e. disavow-- their oaths was the main thing.)

Many of the churches with active missions in Kenya at the time-- 1953-1959-- took an active part in this process. Partly, they thought they were bringing "civilization" to the natives (!?!) Partly, it was way of "harvesting souls and filling their own coffers. Partly, a way of ingratiating themselves with the colonial authorities.

The Anglican Archbishop of Mombasa, Leonard Beecher, even three times presided over a special little liturgy in one of the detention camps, wherein the "confessing" Kikuyu renounced their Mau Mau oaths and agreed to be baptised and study how to become good Christians. (text of this: p.231) The deal was at that stage they could be sent "down" the detention-camp Pipeline to a less onerous detention camp...

Christian evangelization was a big part of the whole "re-education" process that was constantly blasted from camp loudspeakers.

Elkins cites sources who saw one or more Catholic fathers riding around with the police, fully armed.

Even, the head of one of the detention camps was the local director of Moral Re-Armament, a Christian revival group.

(2) The ICRC wasn't any better, either. In 1957, ICRC delegate Henri Junod made an inspection visit of one particularly nasty set of detention camps, the Mwea camps. Afterwards, according to the memoir of camp head Terence Gavaghan, Junod turned to him and said, "Ne vous inquietez pas [Do not distress yourself]. Compared to the French in Algeria, you are angels of mercy." In the copy of the confidential report that Junod wrote to the colony's governor, Evelyn Baring (son of Lord Cromer, who'd earlier been Viceroy or whatever in Egypt), he apparently made no criticisms of the harsh policies he had witnessed in the camps.(p.331-- worth following up, I think?)

(3) There were no international, non-governmental human rights groups in those days. But the British were worried about the terms of the European Convention on Human Rights (and the Universal Declaration, but less so). They tried to keep within the terms of ECHR-- permissively interpreted-- by making sure that the largescale abuses took place only when there was a formal State of Emergency in the country. Then, when it becam,e clear the SoE would soon have to end, they tried to reduce the number of those still held without trial to a number low enough that it might not get noticed much in Europe... To do that, they stepped up the level of violence against the remaining detainees in an attempt to force as many as possible of them to "confess". It was this last, desperate application of violence that led to an incident in the Hola camp that "broke the camel's back" of denial in London, and finally forced London to allow a one-person-one-vote election and then to start negotiating full independence with Kenyatta...

(4) Kenyatta's role vis a vis those former Mau Mau who survived the British terror does not come out looking good, at all. Basically, though it was their heroism under duress that finally catapulted him to victory, afterwards he did nothing to redress their grievances or provide restitution/reparataion for the enormous losses they had suffered during the Emergency.

(5) Of the British institutions, it was a small group within the Labour Party that came out looking best. This included Barbara Castle-- later a senior minister in the Wilson government-- and a few others, and an organization called the Movement for Colonial Freedom.

(6) At the end of the day, it was a handful of significant defections from the Conservative Party that forced change on the party leadership. Leading the defectors was Enoch Powell, who in a parliamentary debate in June 1959 said, "The Tory Party must be cured of the British Empire, of the pitiful yearning to cling to the relics of a bygone system... The courage to act rationally will follow from the courage to see other things as they are."(p.350)

What a great line!

Powell was always a bit of a political maverick. Later, he reconciled with the Tory Party and became a strong voice in Britain for immigration controls. (My father worked briefly with him in Military Intel during WW2, and remembered him as an extremely smart but also arrogant person.)

But a great line, anyway. How about this one:

"The Republican Party must be cured of the American Empire, of the pitiful yearning to cling to the relics of a bygone system... The courage to act rationally will follow from the courage to see other things as they are." (H. Cobban, 2005; hat-tip to Enoch Powell)

Posted by Helena at 19.07.2005 20:48